RAT LAB: why the wider survivor community is the key to our professional development programme

It’s been a while, friends! Starting the year with a two-week festival took a lot of our attention, but it’s far from all we’ve been doing. Before we reflect in detail on that whirlwind, we wanted to share with you an update on how a much slower, more reflective part of our work has been going.

Our first year of RAT LAB is off to a great start, with each of our four first cohort artists now having delivered their first workshop for the rest of the community. They design these sessions as light-touch research and development exercises to expand on and explore ideas for their projects, with wider survivor involvement and perspective.

It's probably the most unique aspect of RAT LAB, compared to other artist professional development programmes, and serves several really vital functions for survivors on this journey.

Why do we do it?

A toe in the water

Trying to get heard as a survivor in a world that has usually silenced you is hugely exposing, and comes with the immense fear that nobody will listen all over again. Of course, any artist can fear being brushed aside, and the experience of pouring yourself into something for it not to be valued isn't pleasant for anyone. But when that experience holds resonances of times in your life when nobody listening has had catastrophic effects on your life or the lives of your loved ones, your nervous system is likely to respond with the same force.

But it's just as important for survivor artists to be able to play, take risks, be irreverent about their own work, as for any other artist. We also need to be ready to withstand the fear when someone doesn't “get it” - which is disappointing for anyone, but can be terrifying if your needs and identity have been misunderstood by people with considerable power over you. 

So building up in isolation to a single showcase isn't enough. We need to build a tolerance to the experience of sharing work-in-progress, in a held setting with others who know in an embodied way how our nervous systems work, and are actively joining us on our journeys to discovery rather than simply watching.

That way, when we take a risk and it doesn't work, we’re all accountable, and we’re all part of figuring out why. When we fall flat on our arses, we all laugh at ourselves rather than all laughing at one person. And when someone doesn't “get it” - after all, we aren't a totally homogenous group - someone else will, and will be equipped to help us figure out how to make it clearer (and if, indeed, we want to do so).

A collective consciousness

So many people have told me that they didn't know other people like them existed until they came to RAT. As a survivor artist working in isolation, you can feel like you have a massive secret, that - if others are also keeping this secret, out of shame or fear, just like you - absolutely needs to be told. But if it actually is just you - then, does it really matter? Do you just need to suck it up so that everyone else can get on with their lives?

The initial experience of finding out there are others who experience the world in similar ways to us is really profound. But we need reminding, again and again - because that reality is inconvenient for so many of the cultural norms and systems on which our society runs, let alone some of the individuals we may have in our lives. So sharing ideas towards an artistic project bit by bit and getting reassurance that others share your truth is the research-and-development equivalent of the peer-support phenomenon of, “Do you guys ever feel…?” “Oh my goodness, YES! I thought I was the only one!”

Not only that - but in finding those shared kernels with others, you also find a variation of nuances to those experiences, and to ways of expressing them, from survivors who come at them from different cultures, educational backgrounds, generations, neurological styles, and communicative skills (you may be able to write it really well, but you never thought you could see it on paper until you saw that person draw it!).

As survivors with inconvenient but vital truths to communicate, we need all the help we can get making ourselves understood on embodied, universal levels - and we have to start with each other.

It works both ways

If this makes it sound like the other survivors in our community are being asked to open themselves up purely for our four cohort members’ gains, then I’m doing a very poor job of explaining this! In sharing their processes, our cohort members are giving an intimate and valuable insight into techniques that members of our wider community may also find useful in their own artistic ventures, now or in the future. That knowledge and ideas sharing is mutual, whether someone has been making art for decades or is just trying it out for the first time: there is little linearity and no hierarchy in lived experience, and that is reflected in how we tell stories.

So what have they been doing?

Sahar wanted to get a really broad-strokes understanding of what participants experienced when they considered the term “spiritual abuse”. Her project in particular aims to shine a light on the specifics and intersections that come into play with spiritual abuse in South Asian communities - but exploring it with a broader group at first helped her to understand where her ‘in’s of understanding are for a more universal audience. She brought in a range of craft materials, as well as stationery for writing, and leaving plenty of space in the room for drama-based explorations. Three groups took vastly different artistic approaches to their responses, from movement to poetry to collage, and represented views from a-religious, ex-religious and multi-faith survivors.

“It felt like a safe space to try new ideas, and I learned a lot about my own creative process. I feel encouraged and more confident.”

Lisa was on the verge of publishing her first poetry collection (which is now available to buy online, by the way - and it’s really good!), and wanted to explore a more interactive way of helping people to engage with it and make it their own. The book charts her first year of sobriety, and will hold many resonances for others in or with experience of recovery - but addiction is just one possible symptom that someone trying to live with unprocessed trauma might experience, and her poems express the essence of managing symptoms while under the shadow of the problem in broadly identifiable ways. She led a part-performative and part-interactive session of reading poems out loud, using them as bases for party-games, and then ceremoniously emptied her whole collection cut up into individual words and phrases in front of us, to pick the ones that jumped out at us and stick them together in our own order.

“As a facilitator, I found that I could hold space for others without needing to micromanage them - trusting that we are all agents of our own creativity. I discovered that facilitation is an art form in itself, which I am developing a voice in.”

Claire wanted to try out one potential approach to her Commonalities project, helping people to find unpredictable common interests or values with people we might not usually connect with naturally. She started by sharing some powerful statistics to debunk the idea that some media outlets would have us believe, that we are all divided and unmotivated to connect. She then invited us - again with an array of craft materials - to make something that expressed something about a passion, or cause, or practice that matters to us. She logged who felt connected to the finished offerings before any explanation of what they represented, and then after that explanation.

“Hearing people respond positively to the project was very encouraging, and their feedback will shape the direction of the work.”

Alain read extracts of the first two poems in his trilogy, Archean. For the first, which is now complete, he asked participants to write down the words, images, characters, senses or other associations that came to them as they listened to his words, and then to share them back - with some palpable shared experiences, and a few interesting variations in what was received. For the second, which was still a work-in-progress, he asked three groups each to pick just one image that stood out to them, and create a frozen or moving image with their bodies - giving insights into the interpersonal dynamics perceived, the textures of the environment in which the characters operate, and helping Alain to note what relationships felt most pressing for further exploration in the rest of the poem.

What next?

Next sessions

This Saturday, 28th February, Claire and Lisa are back up for their second exploratory workshops. It isn’t too late to get an insight into their journeys, so if you are an interested survivor, please come and join us from 2-5pm at Old Diorama Arts Centre, 201 Drummond Street, Regent’s Place, London NW1 3FE. Alain and Sahar are next up at the end of March.

You’re welcome just to turn up - but if you’re comfortable signing up in advance, you can also let us know about any access needs that way. (We can’t always create the ideal space for everyone, but if we know who we have we can do our best.)

Sharing later in the year: CALLING VENUES!

We are also delighted to announce that, thanks to some National Lottery funding, we are now able to confirm that we will be able to hold a final sharing of this cohort’s progress later this year! We really want this to bring together people from all angles who are devoted to lived experience leadership in storytelling, and to become an annual opportunity for us to get together and share progress, knowledge, plans and dreams.

So if you’re a survivor, a researcher, a social worker, a health professional, a charity leader, a public health worker, a social prescriber, a policy maker, a campaigner, or any combination of the above, please sign up to our newsletter to make sure you get the memo when we have a date and venue.

Speaking of which… If you’re reading this and you happen to have access to a venue in London that would be interested in hosting this, or know someone who might be interested in helping, please get in touch with nell@responseabilitytheatre.com! As we say all too often, we need all the help we can get - but we also truly believe it’s the start of something really special, and something on which you won't want to miss out.