Healthy outlook

The power of healing through the arts is incalculable but highly effective. When funding cuts paralysed the Vayu Naidu Storytelling Theatre Company (VNSTC), we feared that inspiration had dried up too. But two initiatives, both related to health, enriched us. Vayu contacted Guy’s and St Thomas’s Charity, which, having established renal dialysis satellite units across London, was interested in exploring our brand of storytelling. Renal dialysis is a seismic shift in the life of those undergoing treatment. Committing to dialysis five hours a day, three to four times a week, in the hope of a transplant, can seem like a prison sentence – lifegiving but with the loss of freedom. So, why storytelling? Because memory can offer release. Storytelling alchemises the mundane into a heightened reality that restores and revitalises a patient by recalling selective memory. Patient-centred storytelling enables interaction and re-imagining. Even patients who did not take part felt a sense of participation by being in the same space. Human interaction stimulated by the artist enabled a sense of connection with the world outside medical treatment. Locating their own memory through stories brought on a sense of confidence. The staff said patients felt positive during the residency. Through the active engagement of the patients’ imagination, Vayu would now like to explore how storytelling actually effects medical healing.

The VNSTC also works with brain injury patients, through Associate Artist and Theatre Director Chris Banfield. Chris spent time as a volunteer at Rehab UK’s Birmingham Brain Injury Centre, helping to support and rehabilitate clients, and the idea for a drama project developed. A move to London, the financial support of VNSTC, and the openness of David Sollis, then Regional Manager of Rehab UK’s London centre, all combined to make it possible. While in Birmingham, he observed dedicated staff helping clients to enhance opportunities for employment through classes in communications/social skills, IT, job-seeking and interview skills. But what of more ‘whole person’ development? The specific components of drama work that could benefit Rehab UK clients embraced not only physical and cognitive skills but emotional ones too.
Play, drama exercises and theatre games might be used to help improve confidence, concentration, memory, imagination, creativity, self-expression, co-ordination/motor skills, communication, language skills and many more areas. A pilot programme took place and, following positive feedback, regular, hour-long weekly workshops ran from Spring 2008 until April 2009 when sadly, in the middle of the recession, Rehab UK decided to cut its London office, ending the entire programme. During the project we received positive feedback from the clients in their perception of the work’s benefits to their individual rehabilitation following injury, as well as tremendous support from the staff. A legacy of the project was two ‘open rehearsal’ events held at Tate Modern.