What is needed now in how we view health, illness, the body, and the role of the arts within health care?
Miranda Tufnell, Cai Tomos and Filipa Pereira-Stubbs are joined by Lucinda Jarrett, Creative Director of Rosetta Life, for a conversation exploring dance, health and imagination. Sharing some of the experiences they have developed over decades, they discuss how bridges can effectively be made between these fields, how they can learn from each other, and how the NHS can be supported by dance at a time of depleted resources and pressure.
They address and articulate the emergent landscape that is forging a new paradigm for health. Dance as activism, how dancers/artists bring a particular way of seeing/being that can work alongside the clinical. They discuss a view of health and what it means to be well, and how that includes attending to the presence of the poetic, the imagination and the felt sense in healing.
Dance, Intimacy and the Civic is a series of conversations by creative practitioners, focusing on potency of dance within the personal entanglements, and social and public space. Part of a wider research strand, it focuses on the place of dance in public life. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the series also asks how dance can enable social cohesion and repair. The series is produced in partnership with Sadler’s Wells and University of Roehampton.
A Quiet Revolution was part of Meeting Places Lab co-curated with Miranda Tufnell in International Festival of Learning 2022 supported by Arts Council England
Learn More:
Rosetta Life – artists working with life-limiting illness
When I Open My Eyes – book by Miranda Tufnell
Cai Tomos’ writing about Art and Health
Filipa Pereira-Stubbs’ work in Dance and Health
Lucinda Jarrett is a writer, independent dance artist, and performance maker who co-founded Rosetta Life in 1997. She currently leads a 3-year creative intervention in the stroke community, Stroke Odysseys. She also leads Dream a Difference, a poetry and songmaking project building awareness of social justice and peace across ten countries where children are living with conflict.
Miranda Tufnell is a dance artist, writer, Alexander teacher and cranio-sacral therapist. She has been teaching and making performances for over 50 years. Her work, both as a performer and in health settings has been to explore the ways in which movement shapes our sense of meaning, language and perception. With Chris Crickmay she co-authored two handbooks on sourcing creative work entitled Body Space Image (1990) and A Widening Field (2004). She has worked extensively in the field of arts and health including part time (14 years) within the NHS for a GP surgery. Her most recent book, When I Open My Eyes – dance health imagination (2017), documents this work.
Filipa Pereira-Stubbs is a Cambridge based dance artist, dance teacher, and creative practitioner with 30 years’ experience in dance & health and in community arts. Filipa devises and delivers dance & health programmes, in the community, in clinical settings, in museums and galleries, and outdoors in Nature. Her projects, including ‘Dance for Health’ at Cambridge University Hospitals, and ‘Dance at the Museum’ (Fitzwilliam Museum) always hold inclusivity and integration of the arts at the core, finding inspiration in somatic practice and the process of improvisation & imagination, calibrating and bridging perceived cultural differences, age differences and health differences. Her work in the field of medicine seeks to create bridges between subjective, phenomenological perspectives of the body, and the larger naturalist and normative approaches to medicine, health and wellbeing. Bsc Sociology, MA DMT, Churchill Fellow.
Cai Tomos is an independent dance artist and Arts Psychotherapist. He has worked as a performer and maker. Over the last 15 years his work has centred around health and the role of dance and the creative arts for all. He is a resident artist at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital for the last seven years offering bespoke bedside dances and conversations with patients in Oncology, HIV and Older people wards. He has run a movement group (CAIN) in North Wales for over 10 years which has been a big part of his learning and development in dance with people who are older. He is an artist with Entelechy arts and co-facilitates Ambient Jam sessions for adults with PMLD in Antur Waunfawr in North Wales. He works as an arts therapist with particular attention to the role of the Imagination in health.
