ARTS AND MENTAL HEALTH FESTIVAL ANNOUNCES
SECOND WAVE OF ITS EXCITING 2021 PROGRAMME
a celebration of the arts, mental health and wellbeing
BEDLAM Arts & Mental Health Festival 2021, featuring a diverse programme of world premieres, visual art, film and powerful live performance through theatre, spoken word, dance and music, announces its exciting online programme of events.
The online events will run alongside the already announced programme of live performances including four new festival commissions, panel discussions and workshops and is a celebration of the arts, mental health and wellbeing.
The festival is organised by Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Midlands Arts Centre, Red Earth Collective and Sampad South Asian Arts & Heritage in consultation with practitioners and those with lived experience of mental health problems.
The festival, which takes place in Birmingham, runs over 10 days from Friday 12-Sunday 21 November and offers a diverse collection of online events including Amina Khayyam Dance Company’s Catch a Bird Who Won't Fly (Fri 12-Tue 30 Nov). This free event is a digital dance-theatre piece made during the Covid lockdowns by working remotely with artists to bring attention to the devastating reality of a crime, which increased during lockdown and is often shrouded in secrecy – domestic violence against women. Using animation and green screen technology, four individual stories are told through Kathak dance from real-life experiences that were researched with the company’s network of women’s group users. (Contains distressing themes).
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| Catch A Bird Who Won't Fly |
Everything is Absolutely Fine (Fri 12-Tue 21 Nov) is an online comedy musical about anxiety disorders, caring and trying to keep going. With power ballads, show tunes and body percussion. House of Blakewell explore what it’s like to be human and to struggle. Alice is making a new start. Things are going to be different. She has moved out of the big city to a small town, doing the job she loves as an Occupational Therapist. She is going to be a new person here, cool, calm and free. The kind of person who goes running every day and can go to a cafe and sit on their own. She is going to make a difference, meet new people and become a new woman… BUT her old friend Anxiety has other ideas…
The Glad Game, written and performed by actor Phoebe Frances Brown, will be online from Mon 15-Sun 21 Nov. From her childhood impressions of Dolly Parton to grown up roles at The National Theatre, The Donmar Warehouse and New York Theatre Workshop, acting has defined who and what she is. In November 2018 Phoebe was diagnosed with an incurable cancer in the area of her brain that controls speech, language and memory.
The Glad Game, which can also be seen live at Midlands Arts Centre (Sun 14 Nov), is a story of finding herself in the bleakest of times, of discovering gladness in the saddest of moments and about how who and what you love can pull you through.
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| Sink or Swim |
Sink or Swim is a short film in which Charlotte Edmonds explores the effects of mental health and depression in a mesmerising underwater ballet. Commissioned by The Space, Sink or Swim is a poetic depiction of depression through underwater ballet, developed with the support of the mental health charity Mind. With choreography by Charlotte Edmonds, directed by Louis-Jack and featuring Royal Ballet Principal Francesca Hayward, it delves into the mind of someone battling to keep their head above water.
The Red Earth Collective presents Menologues and Femelogues (Fri 19-Sun 21 Nov) a series of short films which will premiere at the BEDLAM festival. At the height of the pandemic, Red Earth collaborated with Film Makers Daniel Anderson from Rites of Passage Productions and Daina Anderson at Open Lens Productions to make the films. The films created are all about the impact of Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement on the mental health of Black women and men in Birmingham.
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Menologues and Femelogues |
Further online highlights include Drawing on Lived Experience Workshop led by Lou Platt a UK based pioneer and founder of Artist Wellbeing. The workshop is aimed at artists/practitioners who are interested in developing their knowledge and skills in creating safer spaces to work in when using autobiographical material; Vincent Dance Theatre’s In Loco Parentis is the company’s fourth production created using a highly participatory, socially engaged model of research, in which collaborators’ voices feature strongly in the creative process and the finished work – either in the soundtrack or performing live on stage; Outside In: Artist Support Day offering tailored, one-to-one, support in setting up or refreshing your Outside In online gallery. This can include help with writing an artist’s statement and tips on how to best photograph your artwork.
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Vincent Dance Theatre’s In Loco Parentis |
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