Healing Arts Scotland

Thursday 22 August 2024

Can the arts heal?

This August, we’re thrilled to be part of Healing Arts Scotland, the first ever countrywide Healing Arts Week, happening all across the country 19-23 August, led by Scottish Ballet (@scottishballet) and the Jameel Arts & Health Lab (@jameelartshealthlab) in collaboration with the World Health Organisation (@who). HAS is a week-long celebration of arts and health events, highlighting the joy they bring to those who take part, and their importance to the nation’s physical, mental and social health.

RUNFOREVER – THROUGH THESE WALLS

22 AUGUST 2024 11:15AM-12:15PM

ABERDEEN ARTS CENTRE – 33 KING STREET, ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND, AB24 5AA

We will share stories from Runforever’s work at HMPG from both the experiences of running and Feldenkrais. These can hopefully be inspiring stories insisting on a truth that is not reducible to data but a fleshier, more lively truth that in its telling might draw us to care. We believe running and Feldenkrais can be forms of art with the potentiality of healing. These stories will show how these practices can make us imagine a different path towards health by acknowledging that “no one can be healthy alone” and that if “we would be able to care more, we would need less cure”. They will highlight the paradoxes we encounter if we don’t maintain awareness on logics governing programmes of rehabilitation and recovery when driven by their inseparable reductive evaluative procedures incapable of catching the interdependency of life and its existential value. In sharing our stories, we will show how the Runningstories radio show and the Photovoice have been creative ways for setting up a path into an unknown territory where values emerge on the way while we learn together.

We hope that these stories are not just celebratory and can be a way to reach out to feel on common ground and inspire change through art.

Video inspiration – presented at HAS 2024

Runforever offers educational opportunities through marathon running and Feldenkrais® for humanising health care within prison environment and in the community. Our projects are particularly important now after covid which has exacerbated the time that prisoners spend in their cells and magnified their sense of isolation and loss of freedom. Both running and Feldenkrais are recognised as invaluable practices of care of the self by combining the individual with the collective: people have the opportunity of being outdoor with others, improve posture, balance, coordination and the capacity of listening to the body in a group environment.

These practices enable the formation of a community of support between all participants – prisoners and non-prisoners – and provide the context where good and healthy social relationships can grow. This contributes towards breaking the barriers and walls between them as running clubs do, “and we will all be Runners…”

Our work is contributing to shape a new understanding of health within prison environment in dialogue with HMPG Recovery, Health & Well-Being Strategy Group which takes in consideration the role and impact of social inequalities and adverse childhood experiences upon mental health.

Runforever is participating in the collective dream of a different way of being in the world.

The Healing Arts Scotland opening celebration will take place outside the Scottish Parliament at 4pm on Monday 19 August as part of Edinburgh International Festival (@edintfest) and the Festival of Politics, and features over 250 performers and participants from across Scotland.

Find out more on the Healing Arts Scotland website:

https://www.healingartsscotland.org/

#HealingArtsWeek #HealingArtsScotland

https://www.healingartsscotland.org/events/healing-arts-scotland-aberdeen