BEDLAM Showcase at Birmingham Rep

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Thu 28 Nov 2024 - Fri 29 Nov 2024

Comedy, theatre and dance will take to the stage at Birmingham Rep this November in a two-night BEDLAM Showcase. Run by BEDLAM arts and mental health partnership, the Showcase celebrates the many different ways the arts can support mental wellbeing.

Taking place on November 28-29, many of the pieces have been created by Birmingham community groups working with professional artists over the last few months.

And the Showcase is an opportunity to share and celebrate their work with the larger community of Birmingham and the West Midlands. “The Showcase will be the culmination of different projects the arts partners involved in BEDLAM have been working on, many with mental health service users,” says BEDLAM co-producer Steve Ball. "All of the work relates to arts and mental health and seeks to raise awareness and reduce stigma around mental health with all sections of the community.”



The programme features new stand-up comedy from LGBTQTeeHee, a group from Birmingham LGBT Centre who have been developing comedy with The Rep, plus musicians from the Red Earth Collective who have been working with service users of the Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation (BSMHFT).

The line-up also includes professional performers and companies including Company Chameleon with their dance piece Witness, Payal Ramchandi’s dance production Just Enough Madness, an extract from Positive Risk created by writer and theatre maker Kate Hoare, and burlesque cabaret from Sweet Beef Theatre.

Now in its 11th year, BEDLAM brings together a host of venues, artists, arts organisations and health bodies including Sampad South Asian Arts and Heritage, BSMHFT, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham Rep and Red Earth Collective to lead workshops throughout the year.

Using the arts to explore issues around mental ill health and well-being gives people the opportunity to open up these subjects in new ways.

Steve explains: “What the arts and theatre can do is to provide a safe space, often through working through imagined experience to explore what can be quite difficult and sensitive emotional issues. Working in a fictional context can provide protection to work in a safe environment in which we can explore quite difficult issues. It also seeks to improve our confidence, our communication skills and our team-working, all of which are valuable life skills which the arts in particular can help us all with.”

Alongside the Showcase, this year’s BEDLAM events also include an exhibition at the Library of Birmingham. On display is work created by participants taking part in activities run by Sampad and Midlands Arts Centre as well as photography of The Rep drama and comedy workshops.

And Steve believes through such events, BEDLAM can help bring around change in people’s understanding of mental health. “It has been a decade since we began working in partnership to create work for, with and by service users and to present that work at BEDLAM Festivals. And what has coincided with this time is that people feel much more comfortable talking about mental health. I think the Showcases can encourage people to be more open about their own mental health and also talk about the mental health of their family and friends in a much more open and destigmatized way.”



And, says BEDLAM co-producer Sabra Khan, the partnerships which make up the programme are well-placed to make contact with people in diverse settings across the city to help reduce those prejudices. “The particular partnerships we have are about reaching different communities across Birmingham - that has always been a key part of it,” she says. “So, for example, our partnerships help us to reach South Asian communities and black communities. We’re going into communities and talking about the benefits of, for example, dance and movement to your physical and mental health. And we’re able to do that thanks to Sampad who are working with groups that have a relationship with them already, it is a gentle way of engaging with that issue.”

The Showcase gives these participants an opportunity to celebrate their creative work and share the results. The Showcase and exhibition are so important,” says Sabra. “For some people, they just want to come along and take part in the activities and don’t want to share anything, they just want to take it home, and that’s fine. But other people are really proud to share their work whether on stage or in the exhibition with their community, their friends, their family and other members of the public and that helps to raise self-esteem and confidence in yourself which is a really important part of developing resilience.”

The benefits are felt not only by the participants in the various activities but also in the audiences who come to the shows. “For me, the events and Showcases are about developing empathy amongst audiences, being able to put yourself in somebody else’s shoes and to be able to learn what that experience might mean for someone else and how it might affect their lives,” explains Sabra.

Research has shown the impact BEDLAM has made on local communities. “Through our various evaluations over the years, we can absolutely say that BEDLAM does raise public awareness and also increases knowledge of mental health and mental illness. Some people learn about all sorts of different experiences that other people have of poor mental health and also how they develop their own resilience or coping mechanisms, ways to live with that.”

And the Showcases have been designed to be enjoyable evenings for everyone.“We would like audiences to experience different perspectives of mental health and challenge their preconceptions. We don’t want to preach to the converted, we want to reach new audiences and to challenge the stigma so that we want to expose them to positive strength-based storytelling which is about recovery and hope,” says Sabra. “So the Showcases are fun and entertaining while also having an important purpose. We know it is a night out and we hope the audience get to enjoy a variety of different art forms but also go away knowing a little bit more.”

For the full BEDLAM Showcase programme and tickets see here.

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