We sat down for an exclusive interview with Jen Chandler and James Heather, two performers in Learn From Us, which features people living with brain injury sharing their journeys and the lessons they have learnt in how to live through music, movement and projections.
Learn From Us tours until 11 November. For more information and booking, visit rosettalife.org.
Learn from Us frames brain injury not as something to overcome but as something that offers perspective — how did that philosophy shape the making of the show?
The show was made including the voices of those who have recovered from brain injury, who offer new perspectives on life after brain injury: they offer listening as a way of living and finding meaning, the possibility of renewal and new identity, the significance of endurance and resistance. These voices shape theatrical worlds made by projections that the cast travel through and learn from and support their recovery.
The show tours to eleven areas and actively engages NHS and health professionals in each one, what does that outreach look like in practice, and why is that connection so important to Rosetta Life?
In practice in each region we tour to, we are offering a “long table’ to coproduce solutions to local need. Led by the model imagined by Lois Weaver, we invite people to a table where the menu is ideas. We invite a mix of healthcare, artists, producers, public health professionals and people with lived experience.
We are also offering artists training to support and develop practitioners locally and tasters, workshops and piloted programmes to model excellence and best practice.
Rosetta Life turns 25 this year. How has your understanding of what arts can do in health settings evolved over that time?
My work began with project delivery as an artist in residence. I think the most significant shift has been the move away from artist led residencies where artists create a response to healthcare to co-designed programmes and co-produced programmed developed with healthcare practitioners, artists, the voluntary sector and people with lived experience. The emergence of co-creation as a practice of democratic delivery with devolved authority has enabled artists to model ways to build inclusive, tolerant communities that defy the health and economic inequalities of our divided society.
I think research has enabled artists to build evidence for good practice. The challenge is that artists have sought to produce research that justifies arts outcomes in the language of health outcomes – gait improvement through dance for Parkinsons, cognition for singing for Dementia, wellbeing markers that are defined through health and not by communities. We need to assert new research models that validate the creative process as an outcome in and of itself, imagination, creativity, dreaming and day dreaming as processes that engage a collective in choice making, agency and purpose and imagining new futures.
Jen, you joined the project 20 years after your brain injury. What took you there, and what has being part of Rosetta Life given you?
After suffering a traumatic brain injury, you feel like life is over, knowing not being able to participate in the life I had and loved was devastating. As a teenager, I did not believe I had the strength to overcome and accept such momentous changes to my life. It was one step forward at a time, until I was introduced to Rosetta Life, which was the catalyst to finding a new and meaning to my life.
James, you went from commercial pilot to author, public speaker, and now performer. How do you make sense of that journey?
I would say there always been a little part of me that likes to perform so it follows that I could do all these things plus I never get nervous, because I’ve faced death, disability and despair before and I’m still here. It’s always essential to have the ability to laugh at yourself and things you do because it’s a crazy world!
What do you most want audiences to take away from Learn from Us, particularly people who have no personal experience of brain injury?
I hope people are moved by the intimacy of the performance and the relationships the audience can forge with the performers’ personal stories. I hope audiences will alter their perspective on people who live with acquired disabilities and that the performance will support our mission to nurture inclusive, supportive and connected communities.