Unmasking Pain

The Unmasking Pain Project

Unmasking Pain is a pilot project exploring creative approaches to telling stories of life with persistent pain that is funded by the Arts Council England. The project is led by Balbir Singh Collaborations, a funded dance organisation, in partnership with Space2, an award winning arts and social change charity based in inner East Leeds. The project involves pain specialists from the Pain Academy at Durham University, the Live Well with Pain resource for pain management, and the Centre for Pain Research at Leeds Beckett.

The Unmasking Pain project brings together the worlds of arts, health, medicine, therapies and academia. The project brings together people with lived experience of persistent pain, carers, artists, health care practitioners, and pain specialists. People living with persistent pain are given access to a range of arts practitioners working with movement and dance, mask-making, clay sculpture and music, to discover creative ways to explore and tell stories of their life with persistent pain.

Taster Session

After months of preparation, we were ready to deliver the first Taster Session to a group of people who lived with pain. Team Beckett comprised Dr Kate Thompson, Dr Isobel Jacob, Dr Ghazala Tabasam, Dr Osama Tashani, and myself. Our role was to participate in the event as pain specialists, yet despite much preparation, this was the first time many of us had taken part in a performing Arts event, so we were a little uncertain about what to expect. At the start, Artistic director Balbir Singh invited each artist to introduce themselves through a short performance of their particular artform, be it music, contemporary dance, or Indian dance. Fortunately, Balbir invited the pain specialists to introduce themselves using words, much to our relief!

The focus of the session was artists engaging participants and pain specialists in artistic movement around the theme of Hop-Scotch. The use of music and movement enabled participants to express themselves in non-conventional ways and this revealed aspects of the lived experience of pain that cannot easily be relayed using verbal health conversation. This is something that our team at Beckett are particularly interested in, and we are in the process of designing a study to explore participant, performer, and pain specialist experiences of Unmasking Pain.

Next Steps

The Unmasking Pain project will unfold over subsequent months through a series of Co-Labs. These are creative and critical spaces for artists, people living with pain, and pain specialists to come together to explore pain. The finale of the project will be an Unmasking Pain Exhibition to showcase the multi-disciplinary artworks created by participants. The artworks will be shared widely in public spaces and health settings. Watch this space to see how we get on.

Professor Mark I. Johnson

Photography by Karol Wyszynski