World Parkinson's Day, Durham University Botanics: Sanchita Mazumdar with Hilary Stout
Creative Health
As the body changes with age, slowing, adapting, we ask: does creativity follow the same path? BSDC explores how creativity can not only persist but flourish across the lifespan. Through movement, storytelling, and artistic collaboration the company nurtures the creative self as a vital counterpart to physical and emotional wellbeing. Creative Health affirms that the act of creating is not only healing, but essential to being human.
“Coming out of the pandemic people were more open to talking about not just physical but also mental health and its importance to their overall wellbeing.
My starting point for Creative Health was to focus on the lived experience of artists. I guide dancers to reflect on their own health struggles and to use their skills as artists to express this lived experience, using the emotional, expressional and storytelling aspects of Indian dance to bring it to the surface.
This discovery of a new way to use the art form has a deep resonance for all involved: the artists find a deeper relationship with the power of their art form, and the participants are able to find new and creative ways of expressing their own experience of physical and mental distress.
As artists and participants alike have discovered, we may not be able to change a long-term health condition but we can change the relationship we have with it.”
Balbir Singh
Unmasking Pain, Leeds Beckett University School of Health: Kali Chandasegaram, Villmore James, Sam Nightjar, Oliver Dover
Unmasking Pain
Unmasking Pain works in communities to co-create new vocabularies and ways of expressing persistent pain. This Fuse Award-winning project has brought together partners from the worlds of health, the arts and academia to explore pain in new and often surprising ways.
Unmasking Pain, Durham University: Writer and theatre director Adam Strickson facilitating a session with people living with persistent pain, to find ways of representing their pain, revealing its true face in ways that words can’t express.
Unmasking Pain, Lawrence Batley Theatre: Balbir Singh, Bobak Champion, Louise Grassby, Adam Strickson and members of 6 million+ Charitable Trust
Balbir has been collaborating with writer and theatre director Adam Strickson for many years, ever since Adam co-founded Chol Theatre, the pioneering intercultural arts company in Huddersfield, in 1989.
In 2023 Adam and Balbir renewed their artistic relationship when 6 million+ Charitable Trust and BSDC collaborated on an Unmasking Pain project with refugees at the Lawrence Batley Theatre and in Kirklees parks.
For Unmasking Pain, refugees working with artists and volunteers used puppets to explore their experience of injury in war and conditions like chronic arthritis and heart disease, the management of which has been hampered by the trauma of being displaced.
Explore more of Balbir Singh’sCreative Healthwork on the BSDC projects blog:
