The Rí Ra Sessions - Live Music in Wexford Nursing Homes Project - Creative Ireland 2024
The RíRá Sessions
was a series of twelve traditional music and dance sessions held in Gorey District Hospital, St Johns in Enniscorthy, and New Houghton Hospital in New Ross. The Wild Turkeys, led by Lynda O’Connor, Sean Nós dancer Irene Cunningham, and contemporary dancer and arts in healthcare practitioner Vivian Brodie Hayes performed in each of these care centers on the 11th and 18th of July and again on the 1st and 5th of August, coinciding with the Fleadh Ceoil in Wexford.
The RíRá Sessions was an initiative of Creative Wexford, funded by Creative Ireland and Wexford County Council.
How can we evaluate this kind of work?
The value of arts (and music in particular) has been exhaustively researched throughout the last thirty years. The 2019 literature review by the WHO and the The Jameel Arts & Health Lab/WHO–Lancet Global Series on the Health Benefits of the Arts published at the end of 2023 are the most recent and high profile arguments for the value of the arts in our lives.
The introduction to the Jameel/WHO/Lancet series tells us that
“Despite the growing evidence base supporting the beneficial effect that general and targeted arts engagement can have, the integration of arts interventions into health-care settings and public health efforts is still far from mainstream …There is a belief that while the biomedical scientist is said to rely on objective, measurable, and generalisable fact, the artist is said to derive meaning from personal experience and subjective feelings. Yet, the truth of these two cultures is more complicated and the space between them is fertile ground for powerful interdisciplinary partnerships and innovative forms of creative inquiry”.
Our Creative Enquiry
Our evaluation was built on the question: what impact will live music and dance have on the wider community of the care home? Our starting assumptions were:
- How we choose to care for people is a cultural act, therefore hospitals and care homes are, by their nature, cultural centres.
- Care centres are communities in and off themselves: a weave of relationships between residents, staff, and the wider community (family, friends, etc.)
- Communities are like complex systems: we can change them if we change the nature of the relationships within them (Meadows, D. 2008)
- Art is not a “treatment” that is administered: it is an experience, it is a cultural right, and it is an essential human practice
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Art, in this case live music and dance, can disrupt and reform relationships.
These assumptions formed the bedrock of this creative enquiry. We asked the question, what happens to the relationships in an organisational culture in a care setting when we disrupt those relationships with music, dance, and human engagement?
The methodology was informed by anthropology and human centred design. We interviewed care staff, musicians, and dancers prior to the events to develop an evaluation framework, and interviewed them again, either after the events or after the completion of the project. The tools were observation, semi-structured interview, and thematic analysis. The focus of the evaluation was on the whole system and the relationships within it, as opposed to trying to demonstrate a simple cause/effect relationship between live performance (music and dance) and patient health/wellbeing.
The data – what we saw and what we heard, is documented here in photos, videos, and recorded interviews and the final evaluation is based on his evidence.
Evaluation conducted and compiled by John O’Brien https://johnobrien.org/