Creative Engagement and Working with Partners - ‘Rhythm of Life: A Research Cabaret’

Can you tell us a bit about your event? 

This was the second year that we produced a Research Cabaret for Being Human Festival and, this time, we wanted to go big! A research cabaret is quite a unique format that takes the elements that you might expect from cabaret – audience seated in round tables, a wide variety of acts, a host in a glittery jumpsuit – and blends them with snippets of research. Each performer has a ten-minute time slot that they can use to present either their research or lived experience through whatever medium they like, and they are encouraged to use some of that time to integrate a mini-talk into their turn. Performances have included singing, poetry, yoga, stand-up comedy and more. 

We are the Durham University Institute for Medical Humanities (IMH), and we are fundamentally interested in the hidden experiences of health; this might mean experiences that are unspeakable, invisible, or hard to conceptualise. As such, we took the Being Human Festival 2023 theme of ‘Rhyme or Reason’ to ask: when it comes to health, what is reasonable? And, can ‘rhyme’ [our nod to performance] help us to engage with our hidden experiences? The set list was composed half of researchers from IMH and half of professional artists (poets and musicians) who were involved with our community partner, RTProjects. Luckily, both myself and Mary Robson (IMH) have prior theatre experience and a shared capacity for silly, so designing the event came quite naturally after we’d cracked the cabaret concept! In fact, the greatest challenge was explaining how the event was going to work to potential performers. 

How did you design this activity to appeal to your target audience? 

Our target audience was quite wide – we wanted to reach people who had lived experience or cared for someone with a health condition, and we wanted people to feel seen in both our research and in the performances. We also wanted to connect with a Durham public who would not usually get involved with university activities. We decided not to host the event in one of the university colleges, but in the more neutral, off-campus venue of the Radisson Blu hotel. The event was entirely designed to entertain the audience, so the cabaret was filled with poignant moments of reflection and, sometimes, purposeful chaos. One of the acts used their turn to deliver a condensed dance workshop that virtually the entire audience participated in!

How did you go about establishing your partnership with RT Projects?  

RTProjects are an arts and mental health charity based in Gilesgate, Durham. My colleague Mary knew Emma Beattie and Beano Flude (co-founders) from past projects and, when we started thinking about partnership, she thought of them immediately. We knew that they would be absolutely on board with a creative event and that their focus on mental health would complement the work of our researchers. We met with RTProjects monthly once we heard that we were being funded to produce the cabaret and, then, slightly more frequently in October in the run-up to the event itself. 

As we had produced a smaller-scale research cabaret the year before, we did not want to lose the format that we felt balanced entertainment and research so well. We pitched the format to them and, thankfully, they loved it. 

What do you feel both sides brought to the partnership?  

The partnership was very equal – RTProjects gave invaluable expertise in areas like access and safeguarding from their years of community engagement in mental health and they also introduced us to some incredible performers, including Amity Miller, Faithful Johannes, and Steve Pledger. 

At the cabaret, Beano performed a spoken word piece that addressed hope following suicidal ideation that resonated with much of the audience. The song ‘Never Give Up’ that he wrote alongside Steve Pledger brought the first act of the cabaret to a meaningful close and many of our audience took the opportunity to donate to RTProjects. Members of the RT community assisted with the set-up and, from this group, we sourced our event photographer and sound technician. The Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University has a reputation for conducting world-leading, ethical, and creative research on the understanding of ill health that centres individual experience. 

While we bought with us the learnings from our various research outputs and processes working with persons with lived experience, I think that our contribution was largely organisational as we worked to identify the best ways for the show’s content (research presentation and performance aspects) to shine. We could offer introductions to exciting new research that our audience and partners would perhaps never had access to otherwise.

Do you have any top tips or advice for future event organisers? 

• Have a strong core format – for us, this was the cabaret structure – then, go wild. Be as creative, bold, and adaptive within that format as possible. 
• If your event is about performance, establish that you will support a range of performing abilities. Some of our researchers had past lives as rock stars or dreams of the West End, but, for most of our researchers, lecturing was the closest they’d been to a stage. We encouraged those researchers to think about their work and how they’d like people to see it and then to work from there.
• Set clear guidance for performers – e.g. your set is 10 minutes, professionals will be paid at Musician’s Union rates (make sure to budget for this as a point of principle). 
• Make sure that you have plans in place for safeguarding – we provided set lists and timings with content notes on the tables, sensitive topics (such as suicide) were placed immediately after breaks so we could announce what would follow the interval and audience members could choose to return to their seats after the act. We also had a nominated mental health first aider and a process to follow in case of an incident. 
• Being entertaining does not mean ‘lowering’ your standards for your work – you are distilling rather than diluting research.