Sabra Khan
Sabra Khan is executive director of SAMPAD South Asian Arts and producer of BEDLAM Arts and Mental Health Festival in Birmingham, a ‘celebration of the arts, mental health and wellbeing’.
We interviewed Sabra in February 2024 as we were developing our Performing Anxiety resource.
Can I start by asking you to reflect on the cultural shift we’ve seen in recent years in the way we talk about mental health and the increasing number of creative projects that explicitly address the subject? What are your thoughts on that?
Absolutely. So I’ve been working in this area for about ten years and I can see the shift from when I first started working on BEDLAM, where we were encouraging artists to create work around mental health and seed funding ideas where artists could explore various issues – either their own experiences of mental health or other mental health areas that they were interested in – to start exploring that and create pieces of work that would then encourage people who saw it to talk about it, to now, where it feels like there’s a real movement, artists are looking at creating work on mental health.
I recently sat on an industry panel with year three students doing a drama degree. And it was applied drama, but we saw about eight pitches, and at least three or four of them were about mental health. So in a sense, what happened was that BEDLAM moved towards thinking about what areas we really needed to explore more, rather than just trying to encourage people to create work on mental health, which is where we started really, so that has been a massive shift. And my work in it coincided with things like Time to Change, which also then started to make that big shift strategically on behalf of governments and public health. So I’ve seen that trajectory play out.
What issues does that raise for you as a programmer?
Well, BEDLAM itself has kind of changed really, and my work at SAMPAD, where I lead on arts and wellbeing – the language has changed, really, so we still call it an arts and mental health festival but we talk a lot about arts and wellbeing, and that’s about inclusivity as well, allowing people to self-refer themselves if they think they have that need, around their own mental health, but they might not be seeing a GP, they might not be in an outpatient or an inpatient.
So we’ve kind of shifted, since the pandemic, to calling a lot of our work ‘arts and wellbeing’ work, except where it’s very specifically about (diagnosis); a few years ago at SAMPAD we did a piece about postnatal psychosis, so that was a condition that Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust encouraged us to explore, and we really wanted to open up those conversations. But generally we call it arts and wellbeing work.
For the festival itself I suppose the issues it has raised for us is that we don’t need to be necessarily encouraging artists to create work on mental health because it is happening and because people are raising funds independently to do it. It’s about where the need is. And so for us, it’s more about participatory practice, more about engaging communities, in using arts for wellbeing, in terms of them looking after their own health and becoming resilient and using it as a tool for recovery, rather than creating pieces that then go and encourage discussion. So we’ve moved towards creating a more participatory model. We ran a more participatory model 2021- 2022, prior to this the five editions of the festival focussed on a programme of performances; we commissioned work, we commissioned artists to research new work, sometimes artists who had lived experience but sometimes not. And then the works were produced and toured and we had absolutely amazing discussions in communities and great feedback, but what we noticed was that what we didn’t get was that kind of real hands on engagement because we were presenting work for audiences. As well as that the Mental Health Trust also wanted us to start encouraging people to explore the use of arts as a recovery tool.
But alongside that, we’re still showcasing work, so the sort of thing I am really conscious of is how are artists looking at their own mental health. To create a show that’s mining your own experience, you’ve really got to look after yourself in how you present it, because once it’s out there how other people receive it is beyond your control. I’m really interested in that, in supporting artists to ensure that they do look after their own mental health. Some of the work that we’ve done in Bedlam, and that I now continue at SAMPAD, is offering an artist wellbeing support really, a space where people can talk that through.
I think the other issues it brings up for me, and because of this ten to 12 year period that we’ve been working on it, is that it’s become more and more important to think about representation and consultation. So from going from a place where we wanted to commission people who want to create artistic work on mental health, even if they had no experience of it, to now thinking much more about whether it’s the right work, whether it’s the right approach in terms of getting feedback from people who’ve got that lived experience and having an input from people who’ve got that lived experience. And when we have had the Mental Health Trust supporting us, that was really brilliant, because we were able to access that kind of advice from clinicians, and people who worked in community settings. So I suppose those are the kinds of issues. I know that when we first started BEDLAM, we came right up against trigger messages, for example, and we’ve moved now to a state where people routinely, I would hope, think about that. It’s hopefully quite standard practice.
What other things have become standard practice for you?
What’s become really important for BEDLAM, in terms of our commissioning of the participatory practice, is thinking about this region and the communities that we have here. So the biggest issues for us here are inequality, and access and the over representation of Black and South Asian communities in the (mental health) system. So that that has become something we think about quite a lot as a group, in terms of our commissions. Our last BEDLAM, 2021-2022, we took that shift from being a programme of work over ten days where audiences were coming into main theatres. There were four (festival) partners, and the majority of us were working with black or South Asian or other ethnic minority communities and trying to target our work in that way – because that is where we think the need is in this city – and trying to find ways of engaging these communities.
I think for SAMPAD one of the strands of our arts and wellbeing work is still about opening up a conversation and that’s partly why the language also shifts to being about wellbeing rather than arts and mental health. Because there is a resistance to talking about mental health or a stigma attached to coming to a participatory workshop that might be about mental health. If it’s about wellbeing, people are more likely to cross that threshold.
The other thing is the whole issue around threshold anxiety. Although our first few festivals took place in main spaces, we realised that actually getting the performances happening in community centres and in religious centres and spaces, churches, just outside of the city centre, where communities live, was really critical, and so we did move programming that way as well. So I think those are the kinds of key things coming up for us as a festival, not to be perceived as being part of the city centre, where you’ve got to come to us and watch the work.
It sounds, from what you’re saying, like mental health stigma is still an issue for your audiences.
I would say so. We have reflected on our aims. We started off with stigma being a main concern. We wanted to challenge stereotypes, discrimination, and create safer spaces for people to talk about mental health. But I think it has evolved to it being more about a space in which we can engage communities in participatory work, and then conversations can happen. But I think that, in terms of SAMPAD and the work we do in our South Asian communities, I would say a key aim is still to challenge prejudices and discrimination and the stigma of mental health.
In terms of that participatory work, can you talk about the processes you’ve put in place to do that work effectively?
At the moment at SAMPAD we run an arts and wellbeing programme, because we’ve had funding from the Baring Foundation. So that takes place at Dolphin Women’s Centre, and it’s called Creating Change. And that has been going about two years under the Baring Foundation funding, but we’ve had a seven year relationship with the centre. And it’s a weekly programme of artists. So what we have in place for that is a regular space so that it becomes familiar to the participants. We’ve worked through different ways of managing this project. Initially, I thought we needed an artist practitioner to be the constant relationship with the participants. But that really limited the artistic practice and form. So it was a drama practitioner, and it didn’t really work because not all artists can do producing and delivery and participation. And I think what I realised as the project developed was that what we needed was somebody who held a project, really, a kind of a coordinator, or producer.
So that role is shared between myself and Naomi, our learning officer. She goes every single week and has got to know the women so she knows who comes, she knows who might not be there, and she knows to pick that up with the centre, to check in with people. So she holds those relationships on a weekly basis. And then every term we have a different artist so that the group can try different art forms. So in autumn last year, we had a playwright and drama practitioner leading workshops around connecting stories, telling your own stories, finding your voice. Finding your voice and telling your own story is like a constant theme of that project because we’re working in quite a deprived community in East Birmingham, mainly with women from Pakistani backgrounds. And so the women that come in may not go into the city centre or other parts of Birmingham very often. And they might have arrived at different times as well into that community so haven’t necessarily grown up in Britain, but most of them have. So we’ve got a learning officer who essentially holds those relationships with the participants, gets to know them, and then we have an artist practitioner who leads the artistic work, but we recruit the artist practitioner, and the whole project is held with a lot of care. So we try and find artists who have got some experience of working in community settings and that type of work.
It’s a project where it’s not going to have a linear trajectory, you’re not necessarily going to get work that can be displayed. And it’s a co-production model. So we always say to the artists, it’s quite good to have a plan but the group might decide to take you in a different direction. Like recently, a participant came to the session and really wanted to do a vision board and not the activity that was planned. And the artist was adaptable, and because our learning officer is there all the time they’re able to meet that need, if that’s what the participants want to do, it wasn’t that what they wanted to do was so different from what was planned, and then the next week, I think another participant also wanted to do that.
So it’s kind of got to be adapted to what the women want to do that week. So I think we hold our project with a lot of care; they know there’s a regular time slot, they know who’s going to be there, they don’t get any surprises. But we also try and build in trips and excursions to bring them to see exhibitions or performances. And we try and support that journey into central Birmingham. So we might work on getting taxis, we are now trying to encourage them to also make their own way so part of it’s about building their resilience and their independence. And the Dolphin Centre is also now supporting us to try and get some volunteers who can then support the artists and Naomi to run the projects and gain more skills in doing that. We recently had an organisation that wanted to kind of come in and just deliver six weeks of workshops because they were running another project and that was exactly the kind of group they wanted, but we said no, because it’s not that kind of project really. It doesn’t feel like it necessarily belongs to us in a way, to just offer it out to a major organisation.
Mariem Omari, who has worked on some very successful participatory projects with minority groups in Scotland, told me one of the things she’d like funders to understand is that if you go into a participatory arts project with a set idea of what you’re going to do, particularly if it relates to mental health, then it can be quite restrictive and even disempowering for people.
Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been working with the (Dolphin) Centre for seven years, and the pandemic meant that the group we were working with at the time, which was probably about eight or nine women, just fell apart, then we did bits of work online and had engagement with maybe three, six women, but it’s taken us up until the autumn, you know, to get to the stage where we’ve got a regular, really consistent group of fixed women. Usually we get 12. So there’s another six that come and go, and it’s taken so long to get to that stage, but they get so much out of it and they come back every week and they feed that back. And for me, if it’s about their wellbeing, when we’ve got an artist in there, then in a way they’ve got to help our artist lead the process to see what it is they want to engage with.
And it’s not that they want to do the same thing every week at all. I think we’ve really challenged them as well. We’ve not stayed in safe spaces. When we were approached by the playwright and the drama practitioner, I really wasn’t sure that would work, I suppose my notion of it was, I’m not sure that they’ll want to do play reading. But actually the approach was very different, it wasn’t that. They’re based on the edge of a park, the Dolphin Centre, and they got them out into the park, took quite abstract images and then went back and said to them that if we were to create a story from these images, what would it look like? So that was a more accessible way of engaging with stories and telling stories. When we have had drama practitioners wanting to read plays they didn’t really engage with that. So it’s just about thinking of different ways of engaging with communities. We do push them but equally we want them to be invested in it it and feel like we’re listening to their voices. So for the next artist that’s going to be selected, Naomi and I have talked about asking if one or two of them would like to be on the panel to help us select that artist so that then they’re building the process.
Would you say that this kind of flexibility in terms of responding to what participants want is an important principle?
Yeah, absolutely. When we first went into the centre in 2017, we had funding from Birmingham City Council. We were going to run something like 20 weeks of workshops, and we lined up about four or five artists. But I suppose some of these communities don’t get that kind of engagement with art on a regular basis, so getting them through the door is hard, and then wanting them to stay engaged, if we were changing the artist every week, there was just a real risk they wouldn’t keep coming back. So we were lucky to have that pilot year to test quite a lot of stuff, and now I feel like we’ve got a case where we can really start building on the engagement levels that we’ve got. But the other thing to say is small groups (are a good idea), I don’t know whether other people have said that. Going in with this notion that we might be able to have 20 or 30 people in a group is really I think it can be quite hard, because we’re also trying to create spaces in which people feel comfortable to talk to us, or to talk to people in the centre, if they’re having a bad day. Having a large group means that they wouldn’t necessarily be doing that. We’re not offering therapy, but we’re offering a friendly ear. Yeah. And in the Dolphin Centre there is support services so we can pick up on anything, if safeguarding issues have come up, we know we can refer on. But we’ve been fortunate in having the Baring Foundation fund us, who o are not obsessed with numbers at all. Finding that kind of funder is rare, I think.
Can you give me an example of a participatory project that has worked really well, and talk about why it worked well?
I suppose I could use one that’s ongoing, which is a project that we do with a group called Journey, an LGBTQ group. This is a group of asylum seekers, led by volunteers, and they’re very much about supporting people who’ve arrived who are LGBTQ to negotiate the asylum system. So a few years ago, as part of BEDLAM, we were looking to do some work with refugees and asylum seekers, and really to do some work in the LGBTQ community as well, because when we were looking at inequalities in Birmingham, that was one area that we weren’t really touching as bedlam. So, SAMPAD opened a conversation with an artist that we know who isn’t based in Birmingham, and this group, and they’d just done a project with another arts organisation. So they were more open to talking to us, I think, at that point, because it had gone well. So we’ve just done a second iteration and we’re going on to a third cycle.
And again, our approach was very much about what they wanted to do. The choice of artist was really, really critical. And so we appointed an artist that wasn’t based in Birmingham or the region, because I really needed an artist that had an understanding of where this group was coming from. And so we chose somebody who is not a refugee or asylum seeker, but they are from the LGBTQ community, and they have experience of being a migrant and having faced discrimination because of both of those factors, really.
I suppose my natural instinct is to always try and work as much as I can with artists from Birmingham or the West Midlands, but in this case it was finding the right artist, and then treading slowly and carefully. So there were lots of factors, and some of them were logistical, like when could we meet with them and make this work with the artist’s availability. And that was really, really tricky. So in the end, we went with weekends, quite a long slot, 10am til 4pm. And then we had to negotiate access issues, like how are people going to get to these sessions when they have no money? And so we worked quite closely with the volunteers. When we started with it, we suggested Wednesday evenings, they went no, you’re not going to get this group travelling on Wednesday evenings on public transport to south Birmingham, they live all over the place. We tried to find a space in central Birmingham, that didn’t work either. And so we had to just put in place lots of things. We had to go for weekends, and we built it around the artist’s availability and the group’s availability and not what was easiest for us in our calendar.
We had to put in the budget to meet travel costs, we had to make sure the budget included lunch for the participants. And we committed to the idea that what was most important was the participatory process. There may be nothing to show at the end, we wouldn’t know that in weeks one to four, but we might know it by weeks five to eight. And because it had to be slotted into the BEDLAM festival, which was tricky, but I would say it was some of the most amazing work that I’ve seen done by an artist with a group. When they first came they were very closed up and were sort of sitting around the edge of the room not really wanting to take part, to very slowly being able to do some work with this artist. And the other thing that I suppose he pushed us towards as an artist leading this group was about having other inputs so that it wasn’t all from him. And he persuaded us to bring a musician on board and have one session with a different kind of play, Lecocq school of art kind of workshop, which really, really unlocked stuff in the group.
So I think, for me, it was just working with that thing of not really knowing what’s going to happen in space and going with it, and allowing the participants to work with the artist to see what would work. But I suppose underpinning it all was some of those really practical aspects of the project, which we had to prioritise, about where it took place, when it took place and how we were going to support participants to engage. Since then we’ve done another iteration, which had a different group of participant. And there’s a few people who weren’t able to take part because of childcare costs, so when we come to stage three, we’re talking about increasing access budget, so that there’s more people who can take part who are interested. But the first group were able to eloquently talk about what it meant to them, which meant that then we got engagement from the second group that came, so it does seem to be building,
Is there one project you’ve done that you think sums up the spirit of BEDLAM?
Probably the piece that we did about post-natal psychosis, which was a commissioned piece in the end, but the writer who wrote it had to talk, or did talk a lot, to a lot of women who experienced it, but also to their families and clinicians, and I think created a really powerful piece of work that spoke of those experiences.
Post-natal psychosis, thankfully, affects much fewer women than, say, post-natal depression. What (the project) did was enable people to talk about the whole range of those experiences as women of having children and how it impacts your mental health. But also we were touring it to community centres, and mainly to South Asian audiences. It played at the (Birmingham) Rep for two nights, and that was open public performances, a lot of people got to see it, but when we toured it into South Asian communities, what was really good was that we opened up conversations generally about mental health. And people were very open about talking about, you know, often it would be ‘somebody I know’, or ‘somebody’s daughter’, or ‘my daughter’ or ‘my son’, but it meant that people, having watched this experience of one family who had this – and it was based on a true story – they were then very open, and happy to talk to the actors, facilitator and everybody about their experiences. And often talking about how we need to talk about this more in our community, how can we unlock this.
It was very powerful, because it also explored things like how we don’t necessarily have the terms for mental health in our languages, and how do we then talk about if you don’t have those terms, and actually the terms we do have tend to be ‘going mad’ rather than not feeling well? So I thought that was an incredibly powerful piece of work.
Performing Anxiety
A resource for people who want to make audience-facing or participatory arts projects about mental health.
