News
An ESRC award of £14,000 has been awarded to Professor Pete Shirlow (Senior Institute Fellow) and Mr David Grant (School of Creative Arts) with regard to the 'Applied Drama and Mental Health in North Belfast' project.
The funding is to help develop a short pilot project led by freelance applied drama facilitator, Jason Hines, through which a Men’s Group associated with the Lighthouse organisation in North Belfast, strive to develop a short performance to highlight the importance of mental health issue for them and their peers.
The specific objectives of the proposal are to create the opportunity for knowledge sharing between the Lighthouse organisation which offers support for those affected by suicide and researchers in Queen's University's Schools, with a view to developing a longer-term relationship and dialogue between the two. At the core of the project will be weekly two hour applied drama workshops.
The project will draw on a number of methodological approaches which are new to the Lighthouse team that are linked to the Image Theatre work of Augusto Boal that has well-established throughout as a means of visual communication which allows for the release of difficult ideas which are difficult to express in words. The use of imagistic tableaux created using the participant’ own bodies can open up topics and issues that may not emerge through more conventional discussion. But the theatrical context allows for an aesthetic distance to be created between the direct experience of participants and their representation in stage images. These initial techniques can lead on to more developed discursive exercises such as forum theatre.
