Health and Performance (H+P)
H+P works across the ATD’s Dance and Theatre Bachelor programmes to provide education and student support concerning student wellbeing and its relation to the development of a personal and sustainable artistic practice.
H+P research is a vehicle to attune to students’ needs by looking back, attempting to grasp parameters of the present and making suggestions for the future.
Individually, together with ATD artistic and technical departments and alongside external collaborations we are guided by the surroundings and a ATD-shared set of values.
Pressure to perform at a high standard, self-judgement and high physical and psychological loads are inherent to arts education and consequent professionalisation. As a non-regulated industry, the boundaries that protect this population are nebulous and physical and psychological safety is not guaranteed.
Through times of global crisis (human, environmental and political), vulnerabilities are highlighted and the need for individual differences to be protected, supported and nurtured is vital.
H+P research tries to bring clarity to these boundaries, to provide the groups and the individual with physical and mental strategies that can be autonomously applied and to inform the organization on how to institutionalise health and wellbeing practices. We aim to move from a reactive model to the promotion of joyful and creative artistic practice development.
H+P is headed by practitioner, teacher and researcher Sofia Ornellas Pinto and supported by practitioner and teacher Lobke Mienis and administrative Gwen Honigh-Severijns.
H+P wider team is composed by eleven more paramedics and teachers that dip in and out of H+P research.
You can find us at the ATD’s Jodenbreestraat location, room 8.46 and 8.47.
