Ahead of the launch of her first book on 21st May at London College of Music (event information and free booking available here), Dr Cathy Sloan talks to leon clowes about how she first became involved with Outside Edge Theatre Company, and how through research into examples of practice in the field has led to her encouraging more ‘messy connections’ to be made between artists and facilitators of addiction recovery arts.
Cathy Sloan is one of the founders of the Addiction Recovery Arts (ARA) Network, course leader of London College of Music, University of West London’s BA in Contemporary Theatre and Performance and senior lecturer in Applied and Socially Conscious Theatre. In April, her first monograph, Messy Connections: Creating Atmospheres of Addiction Recovery Through Performance Practice was published by Routledge. Here, she talks to leon clowes about this journey.
leon: How did you become involved in addiction recovery arts and what excites you about these practices?
Cathy: I became involved through happy happenstance. I had taken a career break from teaching and came over to London to study an MA in Applied Theatre at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. I wanted an experience that was outside of education. It was my chance to go to drama school in my mid-30s. I had been fortunate to be given a scholarship at a point in my life where it was time to re-evaluate a lot of things.
People might relate to this as the old geographical, the “let’s go somewhere else and see what happens.” I wanted to do something that wasn’t what I was used to. While teaching in Northern Ireland, I had taught students who’d come from complicated backgrounds. I could relate to that, but I was seeing the school system failing them. They’d come to the drama room, and we’d see them as a person. Yet as their form teacher, I’d see them come up against barriers and problems, some facing exclusion. I sort of felt ‘what can theatre do?’ What is it about the drama room that creates this different kind of productive atmosphere?
During my MA, I was given a work placement at Outside Edge Theatre Company. My tutor Selina Busby asked if I would like to work with adults in a theatre company. This was like a dream come true, working as a director. I had been directing shows throughout my youth. Selina told me that the theatre company worked with people in recovery from addiction and I thought that would be interesting.
I remember the day I began at Outside Edge. It’s referenced in a chapter in my book about places of recovery. I felt a connection to 61 Munster Road, that first evening, going to what was then a rehab. In the back room, there was the big workshop space that we used to use. I met this guy who was wearing these woollen fingerless gloves, a long overcoat, a hat and had a short beard. He looked quite mysterious. That was Phil Fox, the founder of the company. We looked at each other suspiciously at first, it seemed, but for some reason, I think he saw in me a need to be there, and I connected with him. It was one of those unspoken moments of, ‘yes, I belong here.’
I started as an intern and would turn up at the Tuesday night group, which was what existed at the time. I found the experience so nourishing and exciting and interesting. It was such an interesting experience creatively. Phil was quite inspiring to me as a director and writer.
The quality of the work and the pieces that we were devising and creating together were important. At that time, we were in the middle of devising ‘Substance Misuse the Musical’, which I wrote about in a chapter published in Zoe Zontou and Jim Reynolds book Addiction and Performance. There was a rock band within the musical made up of people who had been professional musicians. We also had people who were acting for the first time and some who had previous experience of acting.
‘Substance Misuse the Musical’ was a kind of hotch potch; a chaotic and eclectic piece that was just so much fun. I had this sense of belonging, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. After that show I became more involved in the company and was offered a job at the end of my placement. I felt honoured that I was the first staffer. I became Phil’s number two. He always used to say to me, ‘We’ll find out what your addiction is, Cathy.’ (laughing)
I wasn’t in recovery from addictions myself, but he had spotted the co-dependent in me. I remember him recommending I go on a CoDA retreat. I had quite an awakening there. I realised then how I belonged – that my life had been affected by addictions. I resonated with the experiences of being a survivor of trauma – the sort of experiences that I hear in the rooms and that I witness when I’m doing this kind of arts work within this community. So, it was – as I said – a happy happenstance, because it wasn’t just about entering this world of theatre, the professional training, later becoming the Artistic Director of the theatre company and all the things that I had the opportunity to do at Outside Edge. It was also a personal awakening. I guess that’s the whole point of this work. You meet people who you have a particular attunement with. It’s unspoken. You feel it. Being part of that community was hugely nourishing. I think that’s what informs my applied theatre practice.
After I had my son, I left Outside Edge having decided to do a PhD, for which I was awarded a scholarship for full time study. In recovery arts, I think it is important to have an understanding that doing this kind of work is not about rescuing. I train students in doing this type of practice and make clear that it’s not about, ‘Oh, poor them.’ We all are survivors in some way. It’s about taking a journey alongside people. Thinking about what is involved in being a recovery-engaged practitioner has influenced the ethos of Messy Connections. It has been very much a personal journey as much as it is about analysing what are the distinct features of practices in this field. The book offers my reflections on what is a philosophy of being in recovery. What does it mean to be in recovery? What is that experience in life? How does artistic practice help to communicate that? How does it help to communicate lived experience, but is also nourishing, and what are the attunements that occur in the collaborations within this work? How does it support the becomings of recovery?
Simon Mason (Hightown Pirates) features in Cathy’s book and performs on 21st May at the launch
leon: In doing the research into different case studies in Messy Connections, what did you learn about addiction recovery arts practices and the people involved in it?
Cathy: I would call it ‘examples of practice’ because case studies are a different thing. The reason why I use examples of practice is because in my methodology, I’m looking at affect. I’m interested in the sensation of the experience. I don’t believe it’s my role to put aesthetic value on things because then that becomes patriarchal to say, ‘this is better than this’ or ‘here’s the toolkit.’ For me, I’m concerned with the ethos of how you curate an experience as a practitioner and engage with people. Recovery is about interrelation and how to relate with the work, with people, places, and things, so how do you share that artistically?
In terms of the examples I’ve chosen, some of those happened during the time of my doctoral research. I began with looking at my own practice, what was happening when I was at Outside Edge as well as afterwards. I was trying to analyse what was unique to my practice, trying to understand it better. The first chapter in the book is about spaces of potentiality and shares my ethos. What is it I’m doing in the room, how am I interacting with people and what’s happening?
Then I realised that there was a need for this type of niche practice to grow. At the time of the beginnings of my research, I was aware of maybe four or five organisations that existed that specialized in addiction recovery, creating high quality performance or art with, by and for people affected by addiction.
As we now know with the ARA network, there are so many more organisations working in this field. I had this hunch that there needs to be a way for us to become visible, and to support each other and collaborate. At Outside Edge I was very aware of how we were surviving from funding bid to funding bid. You’re constantly trying to reinvent projects in order to continue funding. Yet I understood the power of this work is through sustained interaction, sustained connections.
I wondered how to observe, or what can I do that demonstrates not just the power of this kind of work and the unique features of it, but also how do I support this cultural movement to grow? There should be a drama, dance, music, or an art project everywhere in the same way that you can find an AA meeting anywhere all over the world. I do believe that whatever shade, or way of getting into recovery, there comes a point where you move beyond treatment and you need to get on with the rest of your life. So, what do you do for the rest of your life? Most of us as humans want to interact socially. Creative expression is so important in recovery to re-negotiate your identity and to keep in a prosocial healthy environment or community.
The best way to do that is through cultural activity, artistic activity. For me, it’s not good enough to just have a society that says, ‘we’re going to give you a few sessions in a rehab or here’s some kind of weekly community therapy.’ It also has to be about how we get on with the rest of our lives. How do we be whoever we want to be in recovery? Cultural activity is a huge part of that.
Hannah Stanislaus founded Lost Souls poetry nights and is performing on the 21st May book launch
leon: What do you think about the future of addiction recovery arts and what the future holds, and what you hope and imagine it to be?
Cathy: Throughout my book, there is a continued thread of thought which is about the messy, the visceral, the emotional. Addiction is such a visceral embodied sensation. A phrase I’ve heard so many times is that whenever you begin recovery, you need to learn how to feel your feelings. There is that messiness, but messy in the context of my book is also about the ‘not yet’ in the philosophical sense of becoming and the ‘not yet’ of a creative process. We don’t know what will emerge in that liminal moment of creating a performance, but it’s also the ‘not yet’ of the person. We’re always becoming recovered or responding to our new interactions as we unfold in our experience of life.
Whenever I was thinking about what the future is for recovery arts, and certainly at the end of my doctoral research, and then at the end of the first version of this book, I had just begun to formulate the idea of the ‘pop up’ recovery arts café. This was the idea that we can have recovery arts happenings wherever they can momentarily pop-up. The premise is that artists in recovery could gather to share their work with public audiences of those in recovery and the recovery curious, as I like to call them, or people who have not yet discovered recovery or indeed anybody that could cross-pollinate ideas in a conducive space. This could be a soft approach to creating an atmosphere of recovery through enjoying cultural experience. Staging atmospheres of recovery is a theme that runs throughout my book. They can be subtle. They don’t have to be banging a drum or be full on. The concept is about how to instigate. I’m not giving a toolbox in the book. I’m saying here are some of the features, here are some of the values and the ways of attunement. If we create these moments, what will happen?
In the first ‘pop up’ recovery arts café in 2019, people like Matt Steinberg from Outside Edge met Mark Prest from Portraits of Recovery for the first time. It’s not up to me to say what happens from that, or who talks to who or what, but it provides an opportunity in the same way as with the Addiction Recovery Arts Network launch in 2022 at University of West London. That event helped Fallen Angels Dance Theatre and New Note Orchestra to come together and open the event with that wonderful collaborative performance. Fallen Angels invited the director of the Royal Ballet and the following year the fully developed version of the collaborative performance between Fallen Angels and New Note was performed at the Royal Opera House.
There are many recovery communities. I use plural because there are all sorts of intersectional identities. It’s not for me to predict the future. What I can do is think about how we help each other to exist, to cohabit amongst society and be creatively expressive? Things will happen. That’s the ethos. It’s not for me to predict, but if we are working together, we’re connecting, good things will happen. The magazine Performing Recovery helps us to do that, helps us be visible. I’m sure there’s so many other things that people out there are doing that we don’t even know about yet and it’s about carrying the message beyond.
If my book can help to do that – to inspire practitioners to think about a way of doing work or even know about this movement, then that’s great. It’s not my job to predict the future, but it is my job to do things that make connections – messy ones – because life is messy.
Messy Connections: Creating Atmospheres of Addiction Recovery Through Performance Practice by Cathy Sloan is published by Routledge and is available in eBook and hardback.
The launch party for Dr Cathy Sloan’s book, Messy Connections: Creating Atmospheres of Addiction Recovery Through Performance Practice, will take place at the University of West London Students’ Union on Tuesday, May 21, at 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM.
BOOK FREE TICKETS TO THE BOOK LAUNCH HERE: https://bit.ly/messy-connections
