International Health Humanities Network: Blog Entries by Keyword

Melanie Boyd is the International Health Humanities Network Canadian Correspondent. This is the second in her series of interview-based articles featuring Canadians engaged in Health Humanities work. In this edition, you’ll meet:

Terry Clark, Post-doctoral Fellow

Department of Clinical Neurosciences

University of Calgary

Calgary, Alberta

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As the health humanities develop and expand, so does the variety of perspectives from which they are approached. One such perspective shifts the focus from how the arts can ameliorate health and wellbeing generally, to how artists can ameliorate their own health and wellbeing in order to optimize engagement and success in their artistic pursuits.  This emerging field is attracting the interest of diverse researchers, including Canadian, Dr. Terry Clark.

A post-doctoral fellow at the University of Calgary’s Department of Clinical Neurosciences (DCNS), Terry has joined a team of medical staff from the department’s Division of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. In early 2014, the team embarked on a three-year funded collaboration with Alberta Ballet, Canada’s third largest ballet company. The collaboration, which involves over 30 dancers, comprises research, education and injury prevention training. Terry describes his role:

I’m working primarily with Alberta Ballet’s company and school – focusing on the health and wellbeing of the dancers and dance students.  I work with physicians and therapists. During the first year of the project I’ll engage mainly in observational research to learn what some of the dancers’ health problems are. In subsequent years I’ll try to identify strategies for injury prevention and health promotion, and ways to implement them.

With Alberta Ballet at its core, the project will embrace artistic disciplines beyond dance. As Terry says,

these three years will focus not only on Alberta Ballet, but also on other dancers and other kinds of artists; for example, musicians, actors, vocalists. Further, we’ll try to engage those working directly with artists – like managers, educators, trainers – as well as people on the medical side who have an interest in supporting artists’ health and wellbeing.

With respect to the latter group, DCNS sees this collaborative initiative as an educational opportunity for medical residents. Terry notes that it might also catalyze a more formal program of study:

DCNS’s longer-term objective is to determine whether it might want to develop courses or programs for residents interested in specializing in performing arts medicine. There is a limited number of such offerings in the UK and USA, and there is nothing in Canada.

Terry’s path to this current work began, not surprisingly, when he was a music student.

My first passion was performing, and my intention was to become a concert flautist. During my Masters program, I began asking myself: What it is about performance that I enjoy? What do I need to do to get the enjoyment I find in music making? I realized that a career as a professional flute player – should I attain one – wasn’t going to be necessary to get fulfillment from music. Also, I got interested in other aspects of music, such as the role of mental skills and states in music making, and the training of artists.

In part, Terry can credit this expanded musical interest to a two-pronged impetus – on the one hand personal, on the other philosophical.  He says:

As a Masters student, I dealt with one of my first major injuries from playing.  But I also saw the number of musicians who suffered horribly from anxiety. People were throwing up before performances, or taking beta-blockers, stress management drugs – some prescribed, some over the counter.  When I raised the issue of anxiety with a professor, he said, ‘If you have anxiety you shouldn’t be in performance.’ He saw musician’s anxiety essentially as a way of weeding out weak musicians. That didn’t make any sense to me at all.

So, after attaining his Masters in flute performance, Terry’s music trajectory changed. He completed a Doctorate in Music, Performance Psychology at London’s Royal College of Music. Terry then moved on to a Research Fellowship at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, where he investigated and developed health and wellbeing initiatives for musicians and dancers. 

This cumulative work – as musician, educator and researcher – laid a valuable foundation for Terry’s collaborative work at the University of Calgary.  He knows the artist’s world from the inside, giving him an informed and empathetic perspective as he assumes a role of observer. He understands that there can be resistance to focusing on artists’ health and wellbeing, and he understands why. For example, Terry says:

Certainly within music there’s very much a view among students and educators that they would rather not face the prospect of physical or mental health problems. Everybody knows they exist, but there seems to be a sense that if you don’t talk about it, or you ignore it, it won’t happen.  But ignoring isn’t a method of prevention. 

When asked what he finds frustrating about such an issue, Terry responds with an ever-present curiosity and understanding:

You mean what’s challenging? The cultural aspects I find really fascinating. People have expectations about what is normal, what is commonly done. For example, when music students enter a university program, they expect they’re going to get private lessons, they’re going to have to study history and theory. But by and large, they’re there to learn how to play their instrument and hopefully get a job in playing it. So to bring them in and say ‘we’re going to spend time talking about mental health, and about fitness programs you should be doing to boost your performance’… that’s so outside expectations of what they think they should be doing.

Terry notes that this is the case even for dancers and dance instructors, who consider hours of rehearsal time – learning and practicing movements, patterns, routines – to be the mainstay of dancer development:

When you tell dance directors that one of those hours might be better spent in core strengthening exercises or fitness activities, they might indicate that this should be done after, not during, rehearsal.

With these challenges afoot regarding even physical health, Terry recognizes that less overt mental health issues likely will take longer to unearth and address. Still, he remains determined and diplomatic. In fact, Terry sees diplomacy as key to introducing unfamiliar ideas into an established culture:

Ultimately, I’m interested in engaging in research that informs practice. How do you engage arts students and educators in new concepts? You have to have buy-in. Without that, you’re not going to get very far.  I’ve seen excellent, well-intentioned projects not get off the ground because there hasn’t been buy-in.  Or the process has got someone defensive and the whole thing has been shut down. You have to recognize the steps and players that need to be involved in order for a project to have impact.

For Terry, “involving the players” moves beyond the specific project with Alberta Ballet. In December 2013, he and numerous collaborators hosted the first Performing Arts Medicine Conference at the University of Calgary, where, Terry says,

the idea was to raise awareness of performing arts medicine, especially for artists themselves.  We wanted to generate a dialogue between artists and art educators, and the medical community – to pull people out of the woodwork and form connections.

This small but successful inaugural conference, which had a strong medical focus, included both international and local keynote speakers. For future conferences, Terry sees an opportunity to augment interdisciplinarity and involve more artists.

Terry’s own future? He’ll continue to research. He also looks forward to engaging more in education and teaching – in more direct involvement with artists. But so far, he says,

it’s been a lot of fun, and also reassuring just how much support and interest there has been in artists’ health and wellbeing.  Not everybody’s on board yet, but people have a least been willing to engage in a conversation about it. It fills me with excitement for the coming years.

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For further information see:

DNCS 2012-23 Annual Report (scroll to 27th page of pdf)

Melanie Boyd is founder and facilitator of No Wrong Notes, an inclusive group-singing model based on the oral tradition. She is also co-founder/coordinator of the University of Calgary Arts and Humanities for Health and Wellbeing Research Group.  Melanie works as a literatures librarian at the UofC.