1. A piece of cake is halfway to hi

1. A piece of cake is halfway to his mouth when Herbert Wollschläger’s eyes light up. He puts down the fork and motions for someone to ease him out of his chair and on to the dancefloor.

2.  “That’s a foxtrot,” he says, raising a finger in recognition of the music that has just started up. “That’s my sort of dance.” The 78-year-old retired electrical engineer who has a form of dementia, probably Alzheimer’s, takes his cue from a carer and suddenly his laboured shuffle has disappeared and they are gliding across the floor.

3.  At the Dance Cafe Wilhelmine in Berlin about 20 elderly people have been brought together to escape for a few hours the dementia that shapes their lives.

4.  “Music is like a silver bullet for those with dementia,” says Christa Matter, psychologist and manager of Berlin’s Alzheimer’s Society, which hosts the dances every month. “People with dementia are constantly being told they can’t do this, they’re doing that wrong, but when they’re dancing they can suddenly move with much more confidence, they know the steps, the music triggers something in them. They might not remember the names of their spouses or children any more, but they haven’t forgotten how to dance.”

5.  These theories have been endorsed by the US neurologist Oliver Sacks who, in Musicophilia, his study of music and the human brain, talks of music’s ability to transcend Alzheimer’s. “Music of the right kind can serve to orient and anchor a patient when almost nothing else can,” he wrote.

6.  The tea dances, which take place across Germany, started several years ago. “From what we observe, it would seem that the response to music is preserved even when dementia is in a very progressed form,” said Matter.

7.  As the afternoon draws on, snippets of the dancers’ lives emerge – randomly, but enough to give the impression of the people behind their ravaging disabilities. Sipping apple juice, Hildegard Gehrmann, who says she is in her early 20s but was in fact born in 1923, says: “I dance at the Rose Theatre and at the Plaza.” Her carers say she was indeed a professional dancer in Berlin in the 1940s.

8.  Bettina Maier, a carer, says that by the next day many of the dancers will have forgotten they were ever at the cafe. “We show them pictures of themselves, and sometimes they laugh and say: ‘I’m not that old lady!’” she said.