Can art really heal us?
Last autumn, UK-based Limbik Theatre headed into the woods in Norwich, England with a multi-generational cast of local community performers, most of whom ran around wearing masks and hessian sacks. The company was trying to stage an outdoor show, but in the process learned something fascinating: Working on the show improved people’s health. Cast members with long-term health conditions were experiencing more energy, fewer symptoms.
What had happened? To explore this and the relationship between creativity, health, and well-being, Dr. Dzung Vo (pediatrician and author of The Mindful Teen), Sarah Johnson (co-director of Limbik Theatre), Amie Buhari (actor and founder of Hebe Foundation) and Sophie North (Lecturer in Health Sciences, University of East Anglia) came together at a recent Unrehearsed Futures conversation.
Holding space
Describing her experience of co-directing the Limbik Theatre show Rebel Rabble across two years, Sarah says that they learned a lot about holding space for people in a wild space. Since they were outside during the two phases of the performance – the research and development, and the public performance – everything moved at a different pace. They learned lessons around how to take care of participants and how to take care of people’s physical health, which initially they weren’t entirely sure how to do it. When they came back for the public performance in the second year, they worked with a new group of participants’ some of whom had long-term health conditions including multiple sclerosis (MS) and long COVID. As the project progressed, they were surprised to see how some of these symptoms seemed to shift and reduce. When the project began, one woman could only do 40-60 minutes or so of work at a time. “We’d carry chairs in the woods. We were constantly thinking about providing sufficient camping equipment for rests” recalls Sarah. By the end of three weeks of rehearsals and two weeks of shows, there seemed to have been a physical transformation within her: her stamina had increased to the point where she was helping with the get ins, erecting and dismantling gazebos, doing two performances, and then staying till the end of the get out. It was quite extraordinary and inspiring to witness.
This opened Sarah’s eyes to possibilities of making theatre in nature to promote well-being, in a more collective way. Not just for the participants and directors but there seemed to be benefits for audiences beyond what they had expected; people liked being in a wild space.
While there was a focus on creating a safe space in the wild with Rebel Rabble, it wasn’t so for actor and singer Amie when she toured with a “wildly intense piece of theatre” which addressed deep, heavy themes of racism, addiction, hate and depression. She recalls that there was “no safe space created” throughout the rehearsal period and for the first part of the tour. There was no system put in place to explore the massive themes they were having to address day in and day out, throughout the play and also deal with these issues in reality as well. “So, life was definitely creeping into art,” Amie shares, “The juxtaposition was quite difficult for the members, especially the younger members of the cast.”
At that time, within her own youth organization, Hebe Foundation, Amie and her colleagues were dealing with the death of a young man who had been murdered by the police. As a Black person, having to deal with this while doing a play on race and brutality resulted in anxiety, stress and more. “There were physical ailments and continuous levels of exhaustion,” she describes. “The body was aching. And one could argue that since we were working through winter, it was normal to have flus and colds, but we could see the correlation between the fact that there was no space to share and process the effects it was physically having on the cast.”
It got to a point where there was a conflict and people felt the need to leave. In all this, Amie emerged as the “cast nurse” who, because she belonged to the older ilk, had already put in place protocols for herself to keep her well-being balanced and thus was able to support the rest of the cast who needed it. Beyond helping alleviate the physical ailments they faced, she became a listening ear, providing pastoral support that was lacking in the theatre company.
To address this need, Amie took upon herself to devise a series of workshops with the cast to address what they were collectively going through. Once such a safe environment was created, suddenly people’s mindsets changed; conversations that were happening about leaving stopped, and people decided to address what they were feeling and moving forward. The physical ailments reduced drastically; the colds, headaches and migraines and the aching body disappeared. People were much healthier, mentally, and physically. “Because we went through this process,” says Amie, “we were then able to compartmentalise topics, themes, struggles, triggers and process it and leave it in a certain place that we could come back and revisit it in a much more formal way.”
Creating spaces of sanctuary
Creative spaces have a lasting impact on one’s mental and physical well-being. We can often encounter a lack of care when we’re focused on the product and not on the journey or the people making that journey. “There needs to be some intentionality around creating a safe space to grieve, to share. And it needs to be authentic,” emphasises Amie. One can create spaces, but if they aren’t authentic, it’s not going to help. We need authenticity to keep the creative sacred and safe, and a place where we can go deep on certain things, while having support systems in place if we are triggered.
That is what Sophie attempts to do at the University of East Anglia, one of the universities of sanctuary for refugees and asylum seekers, in England. Led by a Ukrainian student and others from Syria and Afghanistan, Sophie and the students started The Suitcase Project, an exhibition of five short films telling the story of their journey – from being displaced from their home country to where they are now; the suitcase being the symbol of belongings that they’d left behind, and how often there’s no space for belongings when one is forcibly displaced.
Sophie also shared what one of the scholars of the Project had written about it: “The Suitcase Project is a hidden deep pain, sorrow and loss I have carried since the fall of my government, and my heart wrenching journey to the UK, leaving everything behind in the face of unimaginable chaos, to choose life over death. Before The Suitcase Project, I’d never dare to talk about my experiences. But while expressing it was therapeutic and an untouched wound that was still bleeding, a constant reminder of what I had lost. In the dark moments, my suffering transformed into my strength and resilience to move forward.”
There are some principles that Sophie and her team follow to ensure they are creating a safe space for these students: a) That leadership should come from within the sanctuary community; b) having a trauma informed specialist support; c) empowerment, choice and opportunity; d) thoughtful consideration related to the risks of re-traumatisation and more.
Practicing mindfulness
What Amie, Sophie and Sarah indicated is that something changes when we begin to pay attention to ourselves, our bodies and minds, and decide to address it. In other words, creative practice is about being present, being in the moment, being mindful.
As a child growing up in a Vietnamese American family with Buddhist parents, Dr. Dzung, now a pediatrician specializing in adolescent medicine, was introduced to the Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hahn. What he knows about mindfulness today comes from that tradition, he says. He went on his first mindfulness retreat after his undergrad, because he was suffering, filled with pain from having grown up in a very racist environment in North Carolina as a child of refugees. The retreat at Thich Nhat Hahn’s center in France changed Dzung’s life; he discovered that mindfulness was not just an idea, but a practice, something that he could use in everyday life. It helped him survive a lot of difficult challenges and times in his medical training. “Then, I started to bring it more into my work, first with young people. I developed a course for young people, wrote a book about it,” referring to his book The Mindful Teen, and adds, “The thing is that mindfulness is not an individual affair.”
A lot of popular mindfulness focuses on sitting in a corner with your eyes closed, being on a beach by yourself to bliss out. For Dzung, that’s not what mindfulness is all about; rather it is a community practice. According to him, “Mindfulness is paying attention in a particular way on purpose, and with unconditional love. If we can learn how to be in the present moment primarily, then that can free us from our worries about the future.” It doesn’t mean one doesn’t plan or think about the future, but that one is not carried away, lost or caught in those worries.
So, how can mindfulness help trauma? Dzung shares that a lot of trauma is about being lost in the future or the past. “We can heal our bodies by being present with that and the trauma that shows up in the body.” Mindfulness has an inherent element of self-compassion, of self-love, which is often hard to access when we’ve experienced trauma or have been told or treated as if we’re unworthy of love. We have to train, remind ourselves and practice that we are actually worthy of love. “How do we do that if we’ve never been taught that or if we’ve had traumatic experiences where we’ve been denied that, for example, when it comes to racism?” he asks, recommending reading the works of Larry Ward and Rhonda Magee who have written a lot on the subject.
Creativity demands presence, to let what is inside flow effortlessly into whichever medium we choose to express through. This presence can be developed further through mindfulness practice, according to Dzung. Taking the cue from Sarah who earlier spoke about doing Rebel Rabble in the forests of Norwich, Dzung talks about a new movement within medicine called planetary health and forest therapy, where being close to nature can be very healing. For those who do improv in theatre, being present and open to what is being offered is key. As jazz pianist himself, Dzung describes taking a few breaths before he plays to center himself and be present because he doesn’t know what he is going to play.
“Another mindful quality is called beginner’s mind. It’s openness and curiosity,” says Dzung, “It’s being open to what’s happening, to surprises, even to things that I think I know. Whether it’s brushing my teeth, or playing a song that I played many times, I want to be open to surprises so that I can always discover new things. It’s a creative energy. Compassion and joy are mindful qualities as well, and when there’s compassion and joy in performance with my bandmates, with the audience, the performance is going to be better for everybody. So, it’s not just about an outcome, but it’s about the way we do it.”
What mindfulness advocates is that the mind and the body are unified; what is in the mind shows up in the body and vice versa. Practicing it can increase body awareness and self-compassion towards the body. “The other thing about trauma-informed practice is that we talk about triggering,” explains Dzung, “And sometimes when we’re aware, we’re aware of things that are difficult. We’re aware of memories, we’re aware of struggles that we’ve had. So, awareness has to be joined with self-compassion in order for mindfulness to be healing. If we’re just aware of our negative feelings, but we don’t know how to be with it, how to hold it with self-compassion, it’s actually going to make us feel worse.”
As creative practitioners, at some point, we are likely to be in rehearsal rooms or spaces where we feel triggered or someone else is. The other key element of trauma-informed practices, shares Dzung, is knowing how much we can be aware at any given time. Maybe we can be aware of our pain for one second or one breath, and then choose to move our awareness elsewhere. “And by coming and going to this awareness, we can increase our capacity to be with our pain and transform our pain. I love that quote about how our pain, our suffering, transforms into resilience in healing. That’s exactly what mindfulness can do. But it has to be done in a very careful and intentional way,” he says, as the conversation comes to a close.
