Joy Club has begun. What an incredibly uplifting way to start 2025, because let’s not avoid the facts; the world is a bit f**ked right now, and I think we can all feel it. Things aren’t maybe as we thought they’d be and we’re still getting surprised by new catastrophes daily. So here’s to wondering; ‘what can we do about it?’ – For a long time now I’ve been thinking about the utility of the artist and the usefulness of creativity. I’ve been wondering what (if anything) I could do as someone who tells stories, performs, designs and co-creates. Specifically as a theatre-maker, there’s a bank of transferable skills, that if lifted out of solipsism, seem to have a broader and more specific impact. Almost as if artists could think of themselves more in service, like a baker or a bin-collector, then perhaps we could function with the exact intention to create the kind of change we want to see in the world.

Lots of people/artists hate this kind of thinking, and I know because I’ve shared these thoughts in groups, conferences and workplace settings to be met by a mixture of grimace and sympathy - as if I’ve totally misunderstood the point of art. So before I explain my thinking, I want to state that I’m all for the forms of thoughtful transformation you can get from an incredible painting, or the primal shifting of watching two bodies dancing in space, I like a straight play, and I think we’d all make music if we weren’t surrounded by it daily. I love it all, but what is it about art that is useful? What is it as an attempt to create change? What is art as service? These thoughts have been percolating for a while and finally found form through this creative project I’ve been funded to carry out thanks to my work as the Creative Associate at TEAM (formerly National Theatre Wales).

It’s important to note that the DNA for Joy Club was formed through the work I did on another emoti-titled-work Happinessless, which was an exploration into all the things we feel when we aren’t experiencing happiness. This project continued my working partnership with Charlotte Lewis, and was the first time I’d ever worked with a mental health practitioner, (for Happinessless it was the wonderful Rebecca Nembhard) shaping and informing the performance work from a psychological perspective. The functioning principles of Happinessless led us to exploring Joy Club, and through it, we continue the practice of having mental health and wellness professionals collaborating on creative projects.

The Joy Club Team is made up of three theatre makers, Frank Thomas, Charlotte Lewis and myself, along with Counselling Psychologist, Dr Annie Beyer, and Fun/Stage Manager Emma Gonzales. Through working with Annie in the research and development stage of Joy Club we did a deep dive on the research around the emotion of Joy. Through this we discovered that there is a lot of understanding about the importance of joy in how we develop our sense of self, interact with others, and maintain our health and wellbeing. However, the research got tricky when it came to defining how someone finds or creates the emotion of joy. Partly because it is an experience that is so unique to each of us. So that became our challenge, and how we felt we might be useful; setting out to design a project that helped a group of people to experiment with and explore what brings them each joy - with the hope of them finding all the benefits we know come with this emotion. So through the research we narrowed down 8 key areas of our lives where joy might be found, and designed a session for each of these themes. Our plan of action is to run eight specialist sessions for a group of ten participants, with the aim of evoking and exploring the concept-experience of joy. Looking at things like Connection, Spontaneity, Creativity etc., the approach is one in which ‘the artists’ are tasked with the creative exercise of actuating these themes through designing and facilitating immersive participatory experiences. Then, at the end of these weeks Annie will sit with all ten participants and conduct a focus group, through which they will evaluate the experience and impact of the project.

I can’t think of any other context I’ve worked in that explores these kinds of questions so directly; How useful was the art? Did it make you feel the intended way? Has it had an impact on your life? Do you feel any better about living in the world? It may be a false premise, and through this work we’ll come to learn that, because it is in the truest sense an experiment - in form, approach, audience, participation and need. And perhaps in asking if it makes any of us feel any better about living in the world, we might all answer ‘no’ having wrongly assumed it’s ‘joy’ we need to fight the current tides of dread, as opposed to ‘solidarity’, ‘hope’, ‘information’, ‘bravery’ or ‘self-respect’. But even still, we take one step closer to finding out exactly what it is that we need, and therefore are more able to create a useful kind of art that helps us feel better about it all. In some way, shape, or form. Through the building of a community, commitment to a routine, the development of new friendships, connection and physical action, the participants offer themselves an antidote against the apparent isolation of modern life - always with the ability to cultivate these experiences for themselves.

Joy Club will run until February 26th and will conclude with a report summarising the evaluation of the project, written and presented by Dr Annie Beyer. This evaluation will help us understand what the experience of joy club was like for those that took part, and any impact it might have had on their everyday lives. Perhaps it will give us some answers about whether there are real world possibilities for positive change in our lives when the arts, artists and creativity are used as the vehicle for that change. Maybe it will also help us understand if there is a future in creating projects that bridge the gap between psychology and the arts, like Joy Club. Following this, Charlotte, Frank and Justin will also be hosting a Joy-Club-Day for anyone interested in participating in a micro-version of Joy Club, in which we’ll engage with some of the actions we’ve carried out so far. So if you’re interested in attending that, please email me at: justincliffe@nationaltheatrewales.org.