Journal of Arts & Communities - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2009

Krysia M. Yardley-Matwiejczuk has addressed the clinical and psychological implications of role play (Yardley-Matwiejczuk 1997) and Judith Ackroyd has thoroughly reassessed the place of role play in education (Ackroyd 2004). But there has been no systematic analysis of the implications for actor training of this growing area of employment. This article interrogates some of the implications of role play for actor trainers, particularly in relation to the need for a clear ethical framework governing spontaneous performance in non-theatrical environments. The article also suggests guidelines on distancing and presencing techniques to equip actors to cope with the unpredictability of role-play based performance.

This article focuses on an individual artist, Josu Pellot Gonzalez, who works in a Chicago community that generally shares his Puerto Rican heritage. Two of Pellot's works, Family Portrait as Boricua Toys: Vending Machine Project (2006) and 1493 at La Municipal Food and Liquors (2008), were inspired by a section of Division Street that is called Paseo Boricua. Pellot first saw the vending machine inside of a local eatery; he subsequently purchased a machine and inserted into it figures of his own immediate family as toys. 1493 was a trio of animated neon signs hung in a store window facing Division Street. Both works self-consciously investigated the collisions and collaborations of commercial spaces and ethnic identity by directly engaging with the visual and spatial fields of shoppers and diners on Paseo Boricua.

Using Bakhtin's notion of heteroglossia as a basis for appreciating the rich opportunities the multiple voices of researchers and participants present, we posit that embodied heteroglossic spaces enhance the collaborative a/r/tographic research project entitled The City of Richgate. Working with visual, narrative, and performative forms of enquiry, contiguously and separately, researchers and participants become a community of inquirers engaged in embodied heteroglossic spaces that exist simultaneously and inter-corporeally within the qualities of a variety of artistic languages and the variation of these qualities as found in particular moments of time and space. Recognizing the inter-corporeal nature of our work extends Bakhtin's notion into a multimodal (perhaps multilingual) context and offers lenses for engaging in collaborative research design and analysis.

In May 2008, five temporary art events were commissioned by Ruth Jones in public spaces in Cardigan (Wales) as part of the project Holy Hiatus. The project explored the possibilities for ritual to be employed creatively in public art practice, and to examine the ways that artists can draw audiences into unexpected and potentially liminal experiences of place through ritual. Some people locally and from further a field knew about the events through publicity material or word of mouth, and made an active decision to attend, while others came across interventions unexpectedly whilst going about their daily business: for example, Alastair MacLennan was working on the footbridge over the River Teifi for twelve hours, tying ribbon, greenery and paper boats to the railings and talking to curious users of the bridge; while Simon Whitehead worked with dancers Kate Willis and Andrea Buckley to create an improvised dance Drift (which followed the flow of the tides) through the town over three days. A few people living in and around Cardigan became collaborators through their involvement in the artists' projects; Yvonne Buchheim created a public performance at Cardigan swimming pool in collaboration with two local swimmers and two singers and Anna Lucas spent three weeks meeting teenagers in West Wales who were actively involved with working animals, in order to gather film footage for a new video installation that was exhibited in the Pendre Art Gallery. Maura Hazelden collaborated with acoustic singer Lou Laurens and created a six-hour performance in the newly built Small World Theatre: a company deeply engaged with local communities. The temporary, mobile and in some cases, understated nature of the works meant that the impact was often subtle, but the artworks nonetheless created a ripple of effect for both active and incidental audiences, leading witnesses to wonder what they had just seen and to what extent they had knowingly, or unknowingly, participated.

Following the completion of the projects, a series of interviews with twelve audience members were carried out by researcher Sarah Pace from Safle (an independent public art consultancy based in Cardiff) in order to gain an insight into how the artworks were received. This article integrates the findings from these with theoretical understandings of ritual from fields such as anthropology, sociology, cultural and communication theory. The article begins by laying out the arguments for and against the creative potential of ritual. The interviewees' experiences of the artworks for Holy Hiatus are then compared to find support for the proposition that experiences of liminality are possible in public art projects that employ ritual. Finally, the article looks at how experiencing public rituals in places that are familiar to us might alter our perception of those places in both exciting and challenging ways.

The names of the interviewees have been altered to maintain anonymity.

There are a number of strands that reflect on the complexities of practicing arts in health in this article, which could be referred to as a servant with two masters. For the practice to be sustainable, it requires a coming together of two disciplines that were once synonymous in Greek times, when science, philosophy, art and politics were interwoven and combined into one worldview but now appear to often be in opposition. Yet it is not unusual to find medical practitioners engaged in the arts, as music lovers or musicians, or as frequent visitors to art galleries and owners of good art, and as theatregoers and readers of literature. Is this an indication of an educated person open to ideas and, therefore, is it fair to say that, art is good for us and good for our health? If so, how do we marry that personal awareness and knowledge in the power of the arts to the discipline of medicine and the practice of health?

When so much control is taken away from the individual with the onslaught of serious or chronic illness, what the arts can offer is a choice of expression. The range of media in the arts provides a broad spectrum for engagement to find a personal or universal narrative, a point of comparison or juxtaposition and the use of the metaphor. The challenge then for the health professionals is how to facilitate this opportunity and strike a balance between constant assessment, and the opportunity to have some ownership in the healing process.

It takes courage in a hospital setting to say I'm not all ill. The Creative Well project was designed for the Children's Hospital at Westmead to offer children and young people with serious and long-term illness the opportunity to access their creative language of wellbeing providing a safe space away from the often exhausting therapies. Using the currency of creativity rather than illness, it can shift the focus of the environment, offer points of reflection, and expand the type of dialogue between patients, health professionals and carers allowing the personal voice to emerge in an often depersonalized landscape.

Considering broader implications, the notion of health as a cultural context, which is the basis of both the Creative Well and Clacia (Creatively Linking A Community through Its Arts) programmes, is reinforced by the health delivery perspective of the Swedish Quilturum programme, transforming health care in the region of Jonkoping which is also cost effective. Quilturum in Charting the Way to Greater Success: Pursuing Perfection in Sweden. Institute for Healthcare Improvement, speaks of Healthcare as a values based system provides ways for articulating, agreeing on and including values that focus on the patient.

One of the startling revelations working with some very seriously unwell children and young people is their desire to be engaged in the creative process and to be involved in continued development in their art form, in spite of their destabilized conditions. Why is that? What does this engagement offer? Can a single story illuminate both the practice and the complexity of the arts and health discipline? Ultimately to see this area develop, we need to return to the question of how we marry personal knowledge of the power of the arts to the discipline of medicine and practice of health, for the benefit of the community.

This is an article about Riverscross, a drama project to devise and produce a TV soap opera, at the Snowsfields Adolescent Unit, Guy's Hospital, in London. This is a residential and outpatient unit for young people with mental health problems. It is part of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) of the NHS. The drama workers delivering the project are Spanner in the Works, who have been providing drama sessions at the Unit since 2000.

Riverscross is the name of the project, and the name of the devised TV drama. Riverscross International is a fictional international railway station in Deptford, South London, and the drama deals with the lives of workers and travellers who use the station. The article outlines the processes by which Spanner in the Works identified a need for the project, and sought funding to allow for professional standards of performance and production. It also outlines how the professional model of TV drama production is adapted and modified to meet the particular needs and challenges of a very varied client group, both in terms of individual clinical needs and also an irregularly shifting cohort.

Arts Development in Community Health: A Social Tonic, Mike White (2009) 1^st Edition Oxford, United Kingdom and New York, United States: Radcliffe Publishing, 252pp., ISBN: 978-1-84619-140-4, Paperback, 24.99

The Applied Theatre Reader, Tim Prentki and Sheila Preston (eds) (2009) Abingdon: Routledge, (380pp.), ISBN: 978-0-415-42886-6, 70 Hardback, 978-0-415-42887-3, Paperback 21.99