Training for Kindness: Embedding Health and Wellbeing into Performing Arts Curricula

This chapter aims to explore the tensions surrounding the ‘embedding’ of mental health and wellbeing provision within performing arts curricula, through reflections on the development of a credit bearing module Health and Wellbeing in Artistic Practice, designed for first year undergraduate degree students. The module was initially created as a way to attend to the increase in students' autobiographical performance work which referenced challenging and exposing themes of mental health and wellbeing, as well as to encourage students to think about how they take care of others who may engage with their work. What this module exposed was a need to reconsider our relationship to the students we teach, their wellbeing, but also our own. As a result of such reflections, ‘kindness’ and ‘care’ have become centralized in our (the authors) experiences of performing arts education in the 21st century. Yet, we do not propose a kindness that fits mainstream interpretations of the term. Instead, kindness is an ethical position that triangulates the needs of the individual, the other and the discipline, and may not always land in the ways that we wish it to. In this respect, kindness is as much about ‘care’ as it is about preparing students for the ambiguity of arts practice in the 21st century.