Welcome to our new Professor of Performing Arts

Welcome Persephone, can you tell us about your career journey to date, and what attracted you to join the Leeds School of Arts?

Theatre has run in my veins for many millennia. As a child I was attracted by the mystical experience of watching performances in open amphitheatres during summer theatre festivals in Greece. Through my imagination, I was teleported on stage to pay my respects to Dionysus, considered to be the God of Theatre and Festivity. The words of great poets stayed with me forever. When the child grew up, the desire for making theatre was maintained until the moment was right.

First, I did my first BA (Hons) degree in Early Years Education with a teaching qualification at the University of Ioannina. My studies helped me to make the connections between child developmental and psychology theories to children’s creative expression. During my Master of Arts in Theatre Studies at Lancaster University I started shaping my research focus on the role of political theatre as an interrogating medium that could improve students’ critical ability in education.

The alternative thought-provoking plays of Theatre-in-Education led me to start a Doctorate of Philosophy at Goldsmiths University of London. My PhD focuses on participatory drama and theatre, the ethics and aesthetics of socially engaged interactive performance, school education, pedagogy, citizenship, and wellbeing. I published three monographs in Greek (1998, 2005, 2007) detailing the key theoretical contexts and practical features of drama and theatre in education, in the process of offering motivation and inspiration to drama teachers and community actors.

Having a passion for community arts-based research, I became interested in the health and wellbeing of those children who are not able to be at school because of their conditions. In the last 20 years I developed a research model of participatory bedside theatre performance in hospitals that explores the relationship between the child as an audience (inpatient) and the actor, the physical being and their energy, the interaction of their bodies, the exchange of thoughts, words and pauses and, the synergies of emotions within the protection of the fictional frame of stories.

Using the body as a tool for learning created opportunities for me to grow my research about the role of embodied and mediated performance in healthcare as a way of normalising the experience of illness through participatory dramas. During the Covid-19 pandemic, ‘Rocket-Arts’, a portable bedside performance, developed into a series of bedside digital cartoon films to support children at Birmingham Children’s Hospital to engage with learning and catch up with their class peers upon their return to school. This was funded by The Lottery Community Fund, BBC Children in Need and Philanthropy. Since then, my research integrates principles of applied theatre practice with technology looking into the importance of performance practices in relation to new media (VX, VR, AR and animation film).

My books ‘Applied Theatre in Paediatrics’ (Routledge 2023) and ‘Theatre for Children in Hospital’ (Intellect 2016) raise fundamental inter-disciplinary questions about children and young people’s language of pain combined with pedagogical frameworks, theatre performance and digital creativity. In REF2021 my work formed an Impact Case study presenting the intellectual, artistic, and social ‘fruits’ of my applied theatre practice in the UK and in Australia.

I am very excited to join Leeds Beckett University at this point of my career. My research has found a good home at the Leeds School of Arts. LSA is a vibrant and inspiring space for innovation, hands-on, practice-based research that is both informed by and demonstrates evidence. I look forward to working with my colleagues, students and stakeholders in arts, educational and healthcare organisations, and services. That is towards consistently finding efficient, sustainable, and creative ways to improve the lives of people, connect hearts and communities through the performing arts.

Tell us about one of your current research projects and how this opportunity came about?

I am fortunate to participate in ‘Future Stories’, an Australian Research Council funded (300,000AU$) innovative technological (VR) approach to creative care for young people with serious conditions. The project is led by the UNSW Sydney and Prof. Michael Balfour. I have been involved in the pilot study in my role as a research fellow affiliated with Griffith University since 2018.

I visited Australia in September 2023 in my current role as a Co-Investigator, and a visiting professorial fellow at the university of NSW Sydney. During my trip I presented talks and workshops to executive senior staff at health.gov.au and worked at Queensland Children's Hospital and Sydney Children’s Hospital Palliative Care. The main study explores the possibilities of applied theatre principles that combine co-designed virtual reality (VR) approaches with intermedia work with young people in palliative care. It examines how arts-based non-pharmaceutical interventions lead to greater degrees of agency and legacy for young people with serious conditions and creates opportunities for the participants to share experiences with medical staff, carers, and siblings in hospitals. I truly enjoyed presenting at audiences from Queensland University of Technology and the University of Sunshine Coast.

I am also currently working on ‘The Connecting Hearts, Empathy, Care and Compassion’, a co-design, inter-generational inter-disciplinary applied theatre project that aims to improve the social wellbeing of children, young people and older populations in South Wales. Funded by the Caerphilly Borough City Council Arts Development Team. You may read more about my projects on my website. It is an Arts in Health programme that focuses on creativity, imagination and the reduction of anxiety and isolation.

What has been your career highlight to date?

My passion and commitment to applied theatre, children and young people has always been an adventurous but also a eudemonic experience. Aristotle’s philosophical view on eudaemonia describes the fulfilment and deep happiness in life as something that can be achieved when private excellence engages the public (Nicomachean Ethics 1095a-15-22). The concept of Eudaimonia helped me serve my own call to fulfil my potential through the art of theatre in the community. The highlights of my career are “eudaemonic” moments of social life during participatory bedside performances with children and young people in hospitals, hospices, schools and recreation centres around the world.

What is more precious than watching children and young people overcoming their identity as ‘ill people’ through the arts with competence in care giving and compassion? What is more rewarding than witnessing that performance evolve in a moment-by-moment relationship with the audience who is at the centre of our practice? We tell the children stories with an open and flexible structure, and we invite them to participate as much as they want and as much as they can, depending on their clinical condition and their mood. Applied theatre for children and young people in healthcare environments is respectful to their condition and beneficial to their wellbeing in times of struggle. In my practice the child is not a patient but an audience, a creative participant. The hospital is not a clinical room anymore but a ‘stage’. The performance is not about the actor but about the child.

Can you tell us about your choice to use stories in paediatrics?

Stories make us human. We tell stories to make sense of what we experience in life and connect with others in good and bad times. Children are the masters of imagination. They have a unique gift, a capacity to pull threads from their worlds and use them in stories that can create connections between them and their characters, between their own experiences and the experiences of others. Each child is unique, and so are their stories.

By seeing with the eyes of our souls, we can see children’s worlds more rightly and empathetically to gain a stronger sense of paying attention to emotions in times of illness. Ten unique stories told by hospitalised children can be found in my book Applied Theatre in Paediatrics. I do not seek to analyse or explain the delight and reward of hearing a story from a child in paediatrics. The pleasure and reward need no explaining. However, stories aid in understanding the language of children’s pain for a better assessment and management of pain by healthcare professionals through participatory arts. Through synergistic theatre practice and reflective learning we develop new ways of improving healthcare.

Can you tell us something about yourself that we may not know?

To enjoy life to the fullest a researcher/artist in healthcare needs to realise the importance of self-awareness and self-care. Performing in healthcare is a critical practice. I understand the complexity and the requirement of self-compassion and kindness, especially after spending a whole day in environments of suffering and cure.

I choose to spend time painting aquarelle on silk fabrics as a way of personal and emotional freedom. Through symbolism and metaphor, as in the theatre, framed silk becomes a ‘stage’ where hospital images shine from the defused watercolours back to me in a new form.

Painting as all art forms allows space for dreaming, feeling, knowing, and living in the present body, offering moments of creativity, expression, and amniotic relaxation. One of my paintings titled ‘Children telling stories under the stars’ was chosen by Routledge as the cover of my book Applied theatre in paediatrics. Stories, children and synergies of emotions. A rewarding experience for me and a good reason for pursuing with my silk creations in the future.