I S P R N G F E S T I V A L S
change o change o W ith the Scottish Mental Health Arts
aren’t nearly enough resources available to support them.’
Previously an October fi xture, the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival has a new spring slot. David Pollock fi nds out what’s in store
two festivals within Festival moving earlier in the year, organisers have had to contend with organising the space of barely six months. Given this logistical headache, the plan had originally been to scale back the number of theatre shows they were programming. Yet what they hadn’t contended with was the boom in new shows dealing with issues of mental health, many of which they had been involved with before, many of which were touring while the festival was on. It seemed foolish not to get them all involved.
‘When we invited people to submit entries for the i rst Mental Health Fringe Award at the Edinburgh Festival last year, over 60 shows got in touch within a couple of weeks,’ says SMHAF’s arts lead Andrew Eaton-Lewis. ‘We didn’t have to seek people out, they all came to us. It’s a noticeable sea change.’ As 2018 is the Year of Young People in Scotland, many of this year’s theatre events at SMHAF have very neatly formed themselves around the theme of Beginnings. ‘Early years mental health is something we’ve wanted to focus on for a while now,’ says Eaton- Lewis. ‘Research suggests that 50% of adult mental health problems begin in childhood, and there’s also been a lot of research and media coverage in recent years that suggests today’s children and young people are facing all kinds of mental health challenges, and often there
Last year’s inaugural Mental Health Award winner will be showing during the festival; Mental by Kane Power is a piece which examines the postnatal depression his mother experienced when he was i ve, which has since developed into episodes of mania, psychosis and anxiety. ‘The show offers an insight into one family’s experience of a mental illness,’ says Power. ‘Through song, movement, medical notes and anecdotes, we try to create a sense of my mum’s bipolar experience, and the effect it’s had on me. ‘My mum has been incredibly open in sharing so much for the show. Some of it I know she’d prefer not to, but she also knows that if the audience are going to leave with a better understanding of mental illness the truth can be powerful, so we’ve tried our best to remain honest, despite the difi culties. I perform it, with intermittent voice recordings of my mum through voicemails she left during her most recent episode.’ Though This Be Madness by Skye Loneragan (a Fringe First winner for Cracked, which explored schizophrenia through her own father’s illness) will premiere at SMHAF and is currently being written. It draws on her own experience as a sleep-deprived new mother to explore, through poetry, performance and physical theatre, the state of mind this period brings.
30 THE LIST 1 Apr–31 May 2018