The Chair and The Cello: Spiralling in with creative safety and care-full processes

Presented by Hannah Banks and Briony Luttrell in the panel session Sharing, Spiralling, Slowing

and Showing (Chair: Sarah Courtis).

Using creativity as a therapeutic act is common in theatre and performance as performers may

sacrifice their wellbeing in a Sisyphean pursuit of romanticised suffering and the endless search

for ‘authentic’ and meaningful creative expression. Current scholarship around mental health

and wellbeing in creative industries and tertiary education indicates a need for novel

interventions in how we make and teach making (Daniel 2022; Gross & Musgrave 2020; Orygen

2017). As practitioners and educators, we propose that creating from places of unresolved

difficulties or mining our own trauma for performance is problematic and we highlight the

importance of care, personal creative safety, and emotionally and ethically sustainable creative

practice.

This paper explores the development of a new performance work, The Chair and The Cello.

Since 2023 we have been researching practitioner well-being, or what we have termed creative

safety. Creative safety is our innovative approach to the process of developing creative works

that promotes equity, wellbeing, and career sustainability for practitioners. The Chair and The

Cello explored creative safety in the devising process by developing a new performance

directed by Hyland, performed by Banks and Luttrell with production management and design

from Walling. Starting with provocations involving stories of personal difficulty, we investigated

the application of Baim’s model of The Drama Spiral, a decision-making tool to help

practitioners navigate the use of personal stories, and Flemmer et al’s Empathetic Partnership

framework, to test innovative methods of collaborative creative safety. This paper will

accompany the premiere performance of The Chair and The Cello at ADSA 2025.