Some words from our Creative Associate Justin:

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 usefulness of the artist and the utiliy 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 is a bank of transferable skills, that if lifted out of solipsism, seem to have a broader and more specific impact. If artists could think of themselves more in service, like a baker or a nurse 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 nice 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? For me, these thoughts have been percolating for a while and finally found form through Joy Club, a 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 researched the emotion of Joy, discovering 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 there's no real way of defining how someone finds or creates the emotion of joy. 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 we hoped they'd also find all the benefits we know come with this emotion. We decided to focus on 8 key areas of our lives where joy might be found, but that also might be good starting points for thinking creatively. We designed a session for each of these themes; Creativity, Spontaneity, Generosity, Calm & Comfort, Noticing, Connection, Contest and Destruction. 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’. Still, we take one step closer to finding out exactly what it is that we need, whilst understanding that it's temporary. Connecting to a fundamental 'why' and 'what for' we create a useful kind of art that helps us. In some way, shape, or form. The side affects of Joy Club are that through running sessions we're actually building a community, commiting to a routine, discovering new friendships, connecting and taking on physical action and designing our own antidotes against the apparent isolation of modern life - with the understanding that we have ability to cultivate these experiences our 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. In a work that offers to help us understand if there is a future in creating projects that bridge the gap between psychology and the arts. In April 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.