Youth Theatre Arts Scotland teamed up with the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities to carry out a research project into the long-term impacts of participation in youth theatre. Last week, they published a full report and eight case studies, which help to prove the life-changing impact of youth theatre on participants’ professional and personal lives.

The report evidences a positive impact on participants’confidence, emotional intelligence, resilience, teamwork and leadership skills, emotional wellbeing, and broadened horizons. The findings are being communicated to key policymakers, funders, and network members, and YTAS hopes to use them to shape future planning and delivery in the youth theatre sector.

Long-term-impacts-research-report-FINAL
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Many health crises are also environment crises.

Climate crisis impacts affect food systems, increase the spread of diseases, and is also manifest in air pollution and urban heat, all significant factors for human health. See World Health Organisation fact sheet here https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/climate-change-and-health. Health is bound up in the various Government Climate Change strategies including e.g. diet, where action on climate is also action on human health. Another key area is greenspace where human health benefits align with climate mitigation and adaptation strategies.

ACHWS next event focuses on the relationship between arts & culture, health & wellbeing, and the climate crisis. We will scope out multiple connections with the help of three presentations:

• Presentation by Ben Twist, Director, Creative Carbon Scotland and Lauren Duffy, artist, RIG Arts on the Clyde Rebuilt project which focused on climate change adaptation and in particularly urban heat. RIG Arts, one of three arts organisations involved in this Glasgow City Region EU funded adaptation project, highlighted the health and social dimensions, enabling local engagement with the issues through activities including creating zines;
• Martin Johnston, NHS Greater Glasgow & Clyde’s Head of Sustainability and Jackie Sands Public Health Improvement Senior: Arts and Health will discuss the #netcarbonzero challenge from an NHS Board perspective (buildings, energy, food, transport, travel, waste, greenspace);
• Victoria Hume of the Culture, Health and Wellbeing Alliance will present on their Climate Award – why they introduced it and what sorts of things it has highlighted.

We are very lucky to have Jean Cameron who is Executive Producer on the Culture Summit 2022 to MC this event for us. With lots of opportunities for discussion the event will open up the issues and show how the arts and culture have a key role to play.

Book a place here.

Please contact Lauren Blair at Voluntary Health Scotland with any questions about this event.

Woven in Govan is a project in which commissioned artists have created work inspired by, or responding to, the stories and voices of women working as carers and/or in healthcare. Artists are socially-engaged practitioners with decades of experience working with local communities to create innovative, temporary artworks in Govan’s public realm.

 

The artworks are a glocal response to the increased care burden of women during the COVID-19 pandemic, part of an international partnership between Scotland, Ukraine and Sweden. Woven in Govan is led by Fablevision, working in partnership with Queen Elizabeth University Hospital in Glasgow, Govan HELP, Moogety Garden, and other organisations and local people in Govan, Glasgow. Commissioned artists are t s Beall (Lead), Ursula Kam-Ling Cheng, Deirdre Nelson, Audrey O’Brien, Donna Rutherford, Alex Wilde and Ailie Rutherford.

Read more here or insta @wovennetwork , fb @wovenartworks

A touring exhibition of the work can be viewed in Kinning Park Complex from Thursday, June 23rd for two weeks. And…. watch this space….discussions are taking place between Fablevision, Renfrewshire Health and Social Care Partnership, the Royal Alexandra Hospital and Creative Renfrewshire about a possible ‘Woven in Renfrewshire’ project.

Creative Conversations seeks to capture some of the experiences that youth theatre groups have come up against throughout the pandemic and challenge our understanding of what youth theatre is and can be.

In this discussion, join host Jo Sharp and some special guests as they explore and discuss the role the arts and youth theatre can play in supporting young people’s mental health during, and after, the pandemic. This session will touch on areas such as social prescription and the place of the arts in the broader health agenda, as well as offer some practical tips for practitioners to signpost and support any young people who show signs of distress.

Panellists: Angela Gray (Tonic Arts), Megan Hatcher (Art Therapist, NHS Lothian), Julie Brown (Toonspeak), Orla Murray (Youth Champion, See Me Scotland)

Register here.

The Singing for Health Network (UK) has emerged following several years of development and identified gaps. The Network seeks to provide a bridge between research and practice, making research accessible and useful to practitioners. It will also support and platform emerging researchers and their work.

The Network aims to support the Singing for Health movement, through supporting opportunities for sharing and consolidating intelligence and resources.

The introduction webinar will:

• Share the aspirations and intentions of the Network
• Outline the results of a survey we ran in the Autumn of 2020 on what people want from the Network
• Launch the new website and its membership structure
• Consult further on how the Network can best support the sector
• Launch a very exciting funding opportunity from Voice Workshop (in partnership with the University of Wales Trinity St David)

Follow the link to register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/singing-for-health-network-introduction-webinar-tickets-138924616267

At a time when so many people are moving online, Tinderbox wanted to turn to the Games industry for inspiration – to ask how games are adapting and responding to the pandemic, and to explore what role they could play looking ahead.

What are the most interesting ways of playing and interacting both online and offline at the moment? Are there possibilities for new connections, learning & collaborations between gaming worlds and other sectors? And how can we build a more playful and creative way forward for us all in the future?

The Tinderbox Playaway Games Festival will explore  these questions and much more. There are lots of events in the programme but of particular interest from the point of view of health and wellbeing are:

• On the 22nd of February we start off with a Key Note presentation How Games Can Make a Better World by Jane McGonigal.
  Jane McGonigal, PhD, Director of Game Research + Development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California. She is the author of two New York Times bestselling books: Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World and SuperBetter: The Power of Living Gamefully. Her TED talks on how games can make a better world have more than 15 million views. She has advised companies including Disney, Mattel, Nintendo, Riot Games, Activision and EA on how to create games that build real skills and help players develop emotional and social strengths they can use in their everyday lives. She is also the inventor of SuperBetter, a game that has helped more than a million players recover from symptoms of depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury.

• On the 23rd of February we explore Gaming for Health, Education & Wellbeing.
  What can games do for education and wellbeing? Join leading industry experts Dr Carla Brown (Game Doctor), Elena Höge (Yaldi Games), Clare Duffy (Civic Digits Theatre Company), and Max Scott-Slade (Glitchers) discussing their experience in gamifying learning methods for the development and wellbeing of children & families, as well as games for supporting health, with Brian Baglow of the Scottish Games Network.

• On the 4th of March we have Games & Empathy Mini-Talks
  A series of short talks from specialist game designers about cultivating empathy and improving accessibility in games design. 

 

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Robbie Mcghee, Chair ACHWS and Chris Freemantle, Senior Research Fellow, Gray’s School of Art and ACHWS Committee member, are part of the Advisory Group for The National Centre for Creative Health and are pleased to announce the new website has now gone live. The website will highlight work happening in England , Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales and share learning from the different systems and policy environments in the four nations.

Tayside Healthcare Arts Trust  (THAT) is a small charity with two key staff, that produces and promotes Art in Health activity across Dundee, Angus and Perth & Kinross. 75% of our time is focused on participatory creative engagement programmes for people recovering from and living with long term health conditions, stroke, Parkinson’s,  MS,  chronic pain, dementia and many others. We employ freelance artists across a wide range of disciplines from visual arts to creative writing, dance, singing and music making, photography and animation. We do not run a venue of any sort and work from a small office courtesy of NHS Tayside.  All our activity is delivered in partnership and as close to our participants as possible, either in inpatients, in community venues or in cultural centres.

Like most people we were not especially well organised for a national pandemic and lockdown. On Friday March 20^th we bought two new laptops, downloaded some current files and tried to get ready for working from home on the Monday.

On March 23^rd 2020 at the point of lockdown we should have had three artists working in inpatient Stroke Rehabilitation Units, and one in Palliative Day Care; singing coaches working with a community based stroke group and a community based MS Group; and our partnership programme with Dundee Contemporary Arts running Japanese Calligraphy and digital photography programmes. We also had a creative writing programme and a Samba Music programme due to commence within weeks.

All of these programmes had to be cancelled or postponed and agreement reached with our artists about outstanding contracts and payments. We then had to figure out what to do next! We had never run any online programmes before, always basing our work on person centred, face to face activity, mostly within peer support group scenarios.

Within a fortnight we had transferred two lead artists contracts to new Creative at a Distance online programmes, one using creative writing and the other photography.  For these first programmes we simply used an email exchange system. Eight weekly challenges were issued by the artists and participants’ submissions were emailed in return.  Artists provided supportive feedback and creative guidance. We shared work from both groups through a new Mailchimp email newsletter and also as weekly Facebook posts. This worked well and after their eight week run we secured additional funding to produce a limited edition Zine and we will now be holding an exhibition of the work and the Zine at Dundee Contemporary Arts in December.

These two programmes were a good start, but we know that a lot of our participants are not able to engage online in a significant way due to their personal circumstances or impairment level.  So, by June we commissioned another two programmes as doorstep deliveries with follow up telephone/video calls and additional doorstep visit support.  One a printmaking and the other a collage programme, both included a prepaid postal exchange element between participants, so everyone sent and received art works and messages to each other in the group.  Each programme also had a 4-page newsletter printed at the end of the programme featuring examples of everyone’s work, with participants receiving multiple copies to share with friends and family.

THAT had previously established a long term conditions choir called Vocal Chord, with Horsecross Arts who run Perth Concert Hall.  We transferred one of our singing coach contracts to run some experimental online Sing N Chat sessions on Zoom, working with members of Vocal Chord to see what we could achieve online.  We had to learn how to use the platform ourselves and be able to help our participants to learn to use it as well.  A short and successful six session experiment has now led to a much larger group of participants doing a fully structured programme, once again in partnership with Horsecross Arts.

It is clear that this situation is not going to be the short term affair that we probably all thought and that the adaptations and new models of working that we are developing are going to become a permanent part of our delivery portfolio.

We are ready to launch a new music composition programme with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in November 2020, using Zoom and sound cloud with both physical instruments and download music apps. We are also working in partnership with The McManus Galleries to deliver a new online photography programme in the new year.  It will be directly associated with a major exhibition in the gallery, ‘A Love Letter To Dundee’ with photographs by Joseph McKenzie.

We are also planning to get back to face to face working and are using our close partnership with Dundee Contemporary Arts to begin small group working sessions under strict covid protection conditions. These will also start in November and will be evaluated with the intention of running a more extensive programme in the new year  (2021). We continue to evaluate everything we do but it is still too early for us to decide what the balance of our programming is likely to be in the future.  We have learnt that we are flexible and can provide local leadership in this area and still be providing the service that we are valued for.

This post is a transcript of Chris Kelly’s presentation at the Arts Culture Health and Wellbeing Scotland online event Caring, Creativity and Connectedness during Covid-19 held on 17th November 2020. Chris is Projects Coordinator at Tayside Healthcare Arts Trust.