The Paddlesworth Project ‘aims to grow contemporary rural communities through the provision of time and space for projects with creativity and sustainability at their core. It is a holistic site for learning and reconnecting through arts, culture and the environment where fun and friendship is central.’  How does Pitch Festival align with and represent those aims?

Our first Pitch has been emotional, hilarious, challenging, tearful, unexpected, miraculous… and it hasn’t even started yet. But that’s what it’s literally all about, pitching in. We’re all in this together facing challenging deadlines, situation and circumstances, pushing windows and pulling together. A collaborative project indeed is setting up a festival. Kid slave labour, late night cleaning parties, to portaloo or not to portaloo… these will go down in Paddlesworth Project’s history. But the real deal is, we’re not all that interested in history. It’s the now moment and the forward growth that matter. Pitch will give us all an opportunity to reach out to people with this philosophy to pitch in and continue to grow the reality of creative sustainability with a holistic environmentally aware site specific lifelong art installation and learning centre.

Do you have a particular craft, art form or skill that you are passionate about?

Personally, I’m a bit of an artistic jack of all trades: painter, photographer and musician. My interests are now in presenting choices to the next generation and responsibility teaching sustainability, particularly in relation to food and the land. So I love to build greenhouses and squash arches and make sculptures which change and grown together with plant life. At the Project we have puppet makers, dancers, sculptors, animators illustrators, print makers and plenty of room for more.

How have you seen arts change lives and communities?

My experience is mainly with children and young adults, who all use arts naturally and instinctively to learn, collaborate and satisfy deep needs fluidly and with ease, going with the flow and transcending time. It’s amazing to watch. I know arts can turn around broken communities and families, I know many musicians who’ve worked in prisons with great success, the list goes on. For me, my mission is to facilitate keeping the young growing with arts throughout their development, so they may never lose their way, their personal empowerment or their expression.

The clue is in the name: at Pitch Festival anyone can ‘pitch’ in. Do you have a lot of people both performing and spectating, and so breaking down that divide?

Yes plenty, many people have contacted us to perform, through the call out and we’ welcome them and look forward to providing a platform for everyone to show case their talents, the days of untouchable stars ought to be on their way out it seems to mostly be unhealthy for all concerned and everybody can offer something, we just need our 15 minutes.

Can you give a whistle stop introduction to some of your favourite artists across the stages?

Randolph Matthews is incredible, see him to believe him – a vocal gymnastic and super personable on stage; really really great fun. Momerath are hauntingly beautiful. With Mampama I just close my eyes and get taken away to a warm beach and smile. The Speedball Experience bring super talented high energy dance dance dance and Miss Pink, fresh from blazing reviews at Glastonbury is going to smash it. The great variety we’ve got heading down is SO exciting!

I recommend you get your tickets now and get ready to pitch right in.

In a little village outside Ashford, a local group are putting paid to the idea that creativity and village life are dead. The Woodchurch Players, founded in 1980, have performed everything from drama to family panto, musical theatre to revue shows, shorts and epics, and their diverse CV includes Rebecca, Allo Allo, She Stoops to Conquer, A Matter of Life and Death, Treasure Island and the play version of Sweeney Todd.

This spring’s performance, directed by Mark Perrien , is their 99th show, and they’ve picked something that can appeal to all. Dancing at Lughnasa, performed at Woodchurch Village Hall, and from Thursday 18th May until Saturday 20th May, might be familiar to some. Written by Brian Friel over twelve days in 1989, it is a touching and heartfelt play about five sisters in 1930s Ireland. Bittersweet in tone and temper, it explores the relationship between the sisters and is cleverly narrated many years later by Michael, the son of the youngest sister Chris. Michael is to all intents and purposes Friel. Described as a ‘memory play’, it centres around the Mundy girls – Friel’s mother and her four sisters. There’s love interests, dancing, laughter and plenty of Irish charm – but knowing that it’s based on true events of loved ones who have passed away gives it a clear tenderness.

Rehearsals are going well by all accounts. It’s busy of course, but that all part of the fun. In fact, gathering together for rehearsals before it all comes together is just like hanging out with friends in many ways.

There are a myriad of benefits to being part of groups like this. Charlotte Maughan-Jones, who plays Chris explains how before she got involved with the local theatre scene, the stress of her job and changing circumstances had become too much. ‘Having just graduated and moved back home to Ashford to start my job, I found that all of my old school friends were no longer around, and I was, for the first time, very alone. I had a stressful job at the time and had given up all my hobbies to concentrate on my career – this proved disastrous for me and I subsequently spent time on antidepressants and in therapy. I have met some of the most amazing people through my drama exploits and I feel richer for it.’

Charlotte got involved with the Woodchurch Players, whom she describes as one of the most inclusive and supportive groups around. ‘The society were so friendly and welcoming to me as a newcomer and I fell in love with the intimate setting for the shows.’ What this means is that there are always opportunities available. Even those who believe they have no acting skills (something that should always be explored!), or just prefer not to be on stage, can get involved. No production can take place without technicians, lighting, costumes, prompting, direction – and those with existing skills or looking to develop theirs are always welcome.

In fact, it plays a major role in the audience’s engagement with a performance. Here, as Michael recounts the summer in his aunts’ cottage when he was seven years old the green fields of the fictional town of Ballybeg Ireland’s County Donegal play out behind him, whilst the period costumes immediately immerse you in August 1936.

The casts range from new members to existing, young and old, male and female. Every year the pantomime is filled with enthusiastic children taking part and becoming part of their local theatre. For Charlotte Woodchurch Players ‘embodies everything that a local community should be – people of all ages, all backgrounds and all talents coming together to do something they love, and something they’re passionate about.’

Come along and find out more whilst you are entertained with song, dance and drama at Dancing at Lughnasa. Tickets are available here or in person at the Woodchurch Information Centre.

This book, edited by Theo Stickley, associate professor of mental health at the university of Nottingham and expert on mental health, arts and health, counselling or nurse education, brings together three rather nebulous and difficult to define concepts – qualitative, art, and mental health – with the aim of proving, at least until the ‘common sense’ argument prevails, that the arts are good for people and should be valued and embedded in practice.

As well as definitions, arts for mental health faces a systemic difficulty. When it comes to healthcare, data is key. Funders and policy makers want evidence, and the form this tends to take is figures, laboratory testing, randomised control trials and money. But not only are creative and arts based interventions difficult to measure in this way, the individual patients and services users do not see the impact in terms of statistics but the effect on their own quality of life.

This book presents eleven key examples of arts-based projects that have sought to promote mental health. They include visual arts, craft making, writing, film-making and performance, and are given the term ‘participatory arts’.

Theo Stickley offers up diary extracts from his early days in the field, when as a mental health nurse in a ‘bleak…limited’ environment where people were ‘stripped of…independence and dignity’ when he set up a creative arts programme that went on to become Nottingham’s Art In Mind.

Asking the question ‘Is art therapy?’ Langley Brown explores the difference between art as therapy and non-clinical activity, and the role of the patient within this. The evolving programme in Liverpool is explored by Julie Hanna and Polly Moseley, with collaborative commissioning being identified as a key area for focus, and four schools are looked at by Edward Sellman and Anna Cunliffe, in a balanced report addresses dangers as well as benefits. Mick McKeown et al. and Shaun & Marian Naidoo both look at the role of film, one as an art form, and one as a research tool.

The final chapter by Helen Spandler and colleagues was undertaken as part of a national study to assess the impact of participatory arts provision for people with mental health needs, 20 and explores how arts can contribute towards a ‘recovery’ approach. Fostering hope, creating a sense of meaning and purpose, rebuilding identities and improving resilience are the hardest to standardise and measure, ‘yet may be the most profound and significant outcomes of participation in such projects’. Helen Brooks and David Pilgrim also consider the distinction between ‘transactional’ and ‘transformational’ change.

Effective art practice should not involve patients as subjects to do something to, but active creators along with artist facilitators, and so many of the chapters look at the perspective of the latter and their own experience. The research examples use various qualitative methods to capture the contexts and meanings of arts practice, with the aim of reflecting the voice of the participant through narratives discourse, ethnography or participatory action research. Researchers are by nature curious, and this curiosity should extend to exploring new methods of inquiry that are flexible and reflexive, truly reflecting the experience of the subject – but seeing that subject as a human being.

This, if anything, feels like the noble goal of Theo Stickley’s Qualitative Research in Arts and Mental Health: Context, meaning and evidence. To view art as a human experience in which the experience of humans matters. Identity, hope and resilience are all important attributes of a person’s life, whether they are deemed to have health problems or not, and arts based approaches offer a ‘unique and life transforming contribution to mental healthcare.’ this collection of research and documentation is one valuable step towards its recognition as such.

Changing Minds, the weekend festival at the Southbank Centre about the role of arts in mental health and the intersection between the two was a fabulously balanced collection of events curated and presented by experts (whether that’s professional or from lived experience). Entertaining and informative, the six story building was awash with people curious to learn more.

A complex blur of physical, emotional and environmental triggers, there is no one size fits all solution. It’s the same for physical health of course, but we can see that, so as visual beings tend to find it easier to understand. Art and creativity can do everything from take the edge off to literally saving a life by providing a lifeline. There’s evidence that the arts can have significant impact upon health outcomes in studies by Arts Council and the National Alliance.

The programme was filled with talks covering everything from how humour can take the sting out of shame with comedians Jack Rooke and Sofie Hagen, how therapists can be ore creative (a panel including Nicola Crooke and Paul Gurney), the place of art versus chemicals (Jo Marchant, Rachel Kelly, Danny Cunningham), what the words ‘mental health’ actually mean (Bobby Baker, David Adam) and more.

There was also the opportunity to try some of the ways in which art can enhance wellbeing, and participants were invited to move the body through dance with Yunkong Song, read poetry alongside Ellie Stamp or craft in Amy Brown’s workshops. Stalls from Mind, Rethink, Time To Change, CALM, Biblio, Bethlem, Lambeth LivingWell, B-EAT and Articulate made for a vibrant area of exchange and inspiration. There was also the opportunity to try some of the ways in which art can enhance wellbeing, and participants were invited to move the body through dance with Yunkong Song, read poetry alongside Ellie Stamp or craft in Amy Brown’s workshops.

The weekend was a reminder than open and honest dialogue, mutual partnerships and curiousity are crucial to changing the perspective of mental heath, but also that it is happening. The spectrum between illness and wellness is a grey one. Good mental health isn’t about not being crazy. It’s about being comfortable, communicating, and connecting.

Sometimes art can be the tool to make that happen.

Festivals have been having a tough time of it. Thousands are held every year, spanning all types of music, arts and culture, and from a high point a couple of years ago, economic and environmental pressures have caused some crashes. A forthcoming conference from the British Arts Festival Association aims to address the question of what festivals and their futures, and how they can not only endure hard times, but contribute towards the communities and societies in which they operate.
The Conference for Festivals: ‘Capacity to Endure’ running over 7th, 8th and 9th of November 2012 at The Southbank Centre and The Barbican features a host of talks, workshops and panels, covering the spectrums of social, economic and environmental sustainability.
It’s not only due to our amateur business skills and lack of interest in accounting that It’s All Happening really do believe in the capacity for festivals to ‘do good’ for the places and faces they touch.
The ethos and emotion of a celebration of creativity is one that inspires most people to start and visit festivals, and such intangible reasons for being are also credible signs of success. One of the key speakers on Social Sustainability is Matt Burman, Head of Programme and Audiences, Warwick Arts Centre and he puts it thus ‘We need to move on from measuring impact in economic terms – the language of miserly bean counters – and talk about the emotional impact, the effect on quality of life, about values of creativity and inspiration beyond those extrinsic factors dictated to us.’
Festivals are valued by audiences and participants for their cultural relevance, the opportunity to engage more deeply in something that matters, to entertain and stimulate, reconnect and discover, and for this reason should be supported.
Contributions to cultural diversity, community cohesion are difficult to measure, but a study by BOP on the effect that Edinburgh Festival had on the city during the 2010 event found that local people were on the whole very positive. . 93% of parents agreed that the Festival event had increased children’s imagination, 89% of locals agreeing that the Festivals increase their pride in their home city, 69% saying that they were now more aware of other cultures, and 55% of reporting feeling that the event had made a difference to their well-being. For giving people kicks, as things go, festivals are surely one of the best routes for communities to go down.
For the pen pushers, political executive and bureaucratic officials, the value of festivals will always be considered in pounds and pence. Unfortunately humans have not yet advanced enough to view the world by any other scale. This event aims to ask what does social sustainability really mean, and is there a more rounded way of judging the impact of an event upon inclusivity, collaboration, community engagement, cultural stimulation – and the contribution to the coffers.