Rosetta Life, the arts-in-health charity, turns 25 this year and marks it with Learn From Us, a new disability dance theatre piece devised with people living with brain injury. It tours from 7 October to 1 December, ending with a single London performance.
Rosetta Life has spent twenty-five years making performance with people living with the effects of brain injury, and it marks the anniversary by putting a new piece of dance theatre on the road. Learn From Us tours from 7 October to 1 December, with one London date at the end of the run.
The show is devised by the company and built around a mother and son in the aftermath of a life-altering illness, one of them a carer and the other constructing a new life. That relationship is the subject rather than the setting: the piece argues for independence after trauma, and for a clearer view of what the unpaid carer actually does.
Four performers appear live. Melanie Pappenheim sings and Elvie Rose Christiansen Head dances, alongside Jen Chandler and James Heather, emerging artists who are also ambassadors for Rosetta Life’s Brain Odysseys project. Video projections set other lives beside theirs, from the sights, smells and sounds of the Indian jungle to an Australian dancer finding strength in the intensity of her passion and her focussed anger. The music is by Jules Maxwell, who also designs the sound; the lyrics were written by participants living with brain injury.
Chandler has worked with the company for seven years, having joined it two decades after the brain injury she sustained at eighteen. Heather, a former commercial pilot, has been with Rosetta Life since 2020; he has written a book, Above Us Only Sky, and speaks publicly about brain injury and recovery.
The autumn dates follow spring performances in Cumbria, Kent and Derry/Londonderry, and run alongside a creative health education and training programme delivered in Devon. Each stop carries more than the performance itself: taster workshops in music, word and movement are open to the public and also run in hospitals, local arts and health professionals are invited to table discussions, and artists will be offered training at the London dance venue The Place in December.
The London performance is a double bill. Sharing the evening is a new community work from Headway London, the brain injury charity that operates across 18 London boroughs and supports more than 950 survivors, family members, friends and carers a year; it is a devised piece with original music from the Ivor Novello Award-winning composer and sound designer Sarah Angliss.
Creative Director Lucinda Jarrett said: “This ambitious work of dance theatre tells the remarkable story of five people who are grateful for the perspective their brain injury has given them, and now want to offer the wider world a chance to see the world through their eyes. Telling the story of the complex relationship between those who are affected by a brain injury and those who care for them, Learn from Us tells the story of people who brave independent lives despite devastating head injuries. This touring theatre work is designed to seed arts and health practices across the country, and will demonstrate how arts and health practices can help us build supportive communities and find solutions for the critical, underfunded and oversubscribed health and social care crises we face.”
The company has a record in this territory. Its Brain Odysseys strand, renamed from Stroke Odysseys, has produced Hospital Passion Play, an opera staged at the Victoria and Albert Museum by seventy performers including a choir of twenty stroke survivors, and I Look For The Think, an online opera released during the pandemic, as well as the touring music and dance show Stroke Odysseys — of which Everything Theatre wrote, in a four-star review, “a beautiful piece of art… an emotive performance”. In January 2024 Rosetta Life projected an artwork, Heart of Care, onto public buildings.
Rosetta Life works in community and clinical settings within the NHS, and says its research shows that agency, meaning, mobility and communication all improve through devised performance practice. With English National Ballet and Breathe Arts Health it is one of three companies behind SHAPER (Scaling-up Health Arts Programmes: Implementation and Effectiveness Research), billed as the world’s largest ever study into the impact and scalability of arts interventions on physical and mental health.
The show runs 50 minutes and is recommended for ages 16 and over. Press are welcome at all three venues.
Autumn tour dates:
- 7 October: livestream from Gloucester Guildhall, 23 Eastgate St, Gloucester GL1 1NS. 2.30pm, Pay What You Can, with watching parties at Gloucester Hospital, Abbeymead Community Centre and Matson Housing Estate, and more to be confirmed.
- 20 October: South Street Arts, 21 South Street, Reading RG1 4QU. 7pm, £10-£15.
- 1 December: The Source London, Source Studios (formerly Stratford Circus), Theatre Square, Stratford, London E15 1BX. 7pm, £10-£15. On sale date to be confirmed.
Tour and booking information for every date is on Rosetta Life’s website.
