It was not your usual workshop icebreaker. We were asked to introduce ourselves not by our job titles, but to share a word describing how we felt as we entered the room.

It set the tone for a day of divesting the many hats we wear and the burdens we carry. I was among some 50 participants at the recent INTERMISSION, a wellbeing day for those working in the arts, organised annually by Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay since 2023 after Covid. As it was my first time guided by professionals who use the arts for therapy and positive social change, I entered the workshops totally unsure of what to expect.

By evening I found myself emotionally refreshed. I had created a series of illustrations through prompts tapping into some of my deepest memories, and thrown all inhibitions to the wind pounding away at an African djembe drum in a drumming circle. The workshop facilitators had created a safe space for the exchange of personal stories among participants who, like me, felt worn out by the work of caring for others, and of judging and being judged. As one of them told me, “I left INTERMISSION feeling less alone.”

The experience highlighted for me something a lot of people don’t know about the arts—that it is not just fodder for entertainment or intellectual reflection. In the hands of sensitive and trained facilitators, music, theatre and other arts can help rejuvenate and heal the spirit.

Aside from a small but growing pool of arts therapists and applied arts practitioners, a number of arts organisations here are active in this space. They include Chinese music ensemble The TENG Company which has a music therapy programme geared towards relieving anxiety and enhancing memory among beneficiaries, and ArtsWok Collaborative which has opened up end-of-life conversations among the elderly and their families through community exhibitions and other arts activities.

Vulnerable youth from broken families and isolated seniors in homes and hospices are among the 17,000 or so beneficiaries every year of Esplanade’s Community Engagement programmes. The arts centre works with hospitals, rehabilitation centres and other social service agencies to conduct over 600 such activities annually, using tools such as songwriting, theatre, contemporary dance, singing, the ocarina, and the angklung. It is poised to expand such work into a pilot “performing arts clinic” to provide a dose of the arts for referral patients.

Creating to move forward

Popular opinion has it that the arts are non-essential, not a significant contributor to GDP and not a viable career option for pragmatic Singaporeans. On the contrary, when it comes to mental and emotional wellbeing, it is crucial to look beyond money and digits. At the heart of all arts activities are creation and creativity, which empower vulnerable individuals and enable them to make meaning out of senseless circumstances in order to move forward.

Psychiatrists and therapists will tell you that individuals who wrestle with trauma and depression are disconnected from their environment. The arts provide a very different way of being and feeling — I understand this from my days as a drama student going through acting classes. Dutch psychiatrist, Bessel van der Kolk, a leading expert in the treatment of trauma, observed the impact of therapeutic drama programmes and wrote in his book The Body Keeps The Score, “Theatre is about finding ways to tell the truth and conveying deep truths to your audience. This requires pushing through blockages to discover your own truth, exploring and examining your own internal experience so that it can emerge in your voice and body on stage.”

In short, theatre like other art forms can give troubled individuals agency, applied theatre practitioner Rosemary McGowan tells me. The chief facilitator of INTERMISSION, she has worked with numerous victims of trauma and abuse. She uses theatre tools in her counselling work to help patients step out of their experiences, which can be “a lot more powerful than just speaking about it”. Through applied theatre, she says,

Non-verbal forms like instrumental music-making and dance allow participants to step out of themselves and connect with their bodies and emotions in instinctive and inchoate ways that transcend words.

As a lot of arts-based activities are communal in nature, the connections made with others are precious and uplifting in and of themselves. Maybe we all need an “intermission” in our lives more than we realise, at a time when nearly half of adults in a recent Ipsos World Mental Health Day survey cited mental health as their number one health concern, ahead of cancer.

Small in scale, large in individual impact

As the national performing arts centre, Esplanade is committed to working with partners to research and document what the arts can do for mental wellbeing. While Singapore lacks detailed studies and data in this area, nine in 10 of audience members surveyed at Esplanade last year said their quality of life and wellbeing improved after attending an arts activity at the centre.

While the National Arts Council is a firm supporter of much work done in this area, the perennial challenge of funding has led many organisations to put research on the back burner. Yet the lack of studies breeds a larger ignorance of the impact of the arts in mental wellbeing. Such impact cannot be measured in terms of droves of participants, as community-based applied arts or therapeutic arts programmes usually take place in small groups, and may lose effectiveness if scaled up.

Hopefully, the plan to set up a National Mental Health Office by 2025 will give a boost to interdisciplinary strategies for treating mental health. This includes more effective collaboration between the arts and healthcare sectors, as well as qualitative research such as longitudinal studies measuring longer-term correlations between the arts and wellbeing.

The larger issue to wrap our heads around, as an output driven society, is that in such arts-based programmes it is the process itself which will be transformative. For example, the wife of a stroke survivor related the pride and joy her husband experienced learning how to play the angklung successfully through one of Esplanade’s programmes. He did so with his one good hand and with the instrument held up by a music stand.

This anecdote makes me think of my late father, who had dementia and was listless and uncommunicative for months. After his death, the dementia daycare centre he attended sent my sister and me a video which showed him dancing with a partner during one of the centre’s activities. The staff were pleasantly surprised to see him swaying and twirling around with a smile on his face, but my sister and I knew this was because he used to dance the waltz and the foxtrot in his younger days.

In our moments of darkness and incapacitation, often it is the fragment of a song or the muscle memory of movement that will lift the spirits. This then, is how we should measure wellbeing, not through numbers and scale but the depth of engagement and the transformation of lives.

This article was originally published by The Straits Times on 11 December 2024.