Jennifer Balink – Memphis Flyer

Mental health concerns seem to be on everyone’s minds these days, as evidenced in this week’s cover story, and Virginia Murphy, founder and executive director of Playback Memphis, has found that true within Playback’s group of professional artists who bring audience stories to life with improvisation, dance, and music.

“We consider our work to be healing work,” she says, “but we were in a moment when we recognized even within our own very healthy organization, by most respects, we had a number of stories where mental health was a central character. … And we didn’t really have a direct way of talking about that with each other. That was true before 2021, before the pandemic, and now it’s kind of on steroids.”

As such, the group has turned its attention to seeking clarity for the sake of mental health and has invited the community to join in this pursuit with its Listening for a Change Week. “It’s an initiative on our part to explore new pathways and partnerships for mental health and healing through the arts,” Murphy says. “We know that we have this incredible therapeutic tool, and we feel like it’s an untapped resource in our community.”

For the Listening for a Change Week, Chesney Snow, a New York City-based, award-winning performing artist and pioneer in beatbox culture, will lead a choreopoem workshop, open to the public, this Thursday. The workshop will give insight into sharing personal stories and using art as a medium for social healing. The event will also include excerpts of Snow’s original choreopoem performance, The Unwritten Law, which explores the artist’s personal journey “from a legacy of incarceration to fatherhood, homelessness to Harvard, to ultimately starring on Broadway.”

After the workshop, Playback will host a free community gathering with Snow at 5:30 p.m. at the Frayser Community Development Corporation garden. You do not have to attend the workshop to join, and light refreshments will be available.

On Saturday, Snow will join in a Playback performance with audience members sharing a personal story or reflection for the ensemble cast of actors, dancers, musicians, and poets to reimagine on the stage. “It’s done in the service of building empathy and awareness,” Murphy says. “You may share a story and see it played back and may see something you hadn’t really considered before. … Not everyone shares, and if you’re in the role of witness, that’s a really important role as well. It helps a lot with perspective.”

After the performance, Jennifer Balink of Kindred Place will facilitate a conversation to reflect on the shared experience of the performance. Murphy says, “We want people to walk out after and feel like they are taking away something that will nourish and support them out of the theater.”

Choreopoem Workshop led by Chesney Snow, Frayser Community Development Corporation, Thursday, August 25, 2-5 p.m.

Listening for a Change: Memphis Matters, TheatreSouth at First Congregational Church, Saturday, August 27, 7 p.m., $10-$30.

When I started working at what is now Kindred Place, one of the first items on my to-do list was planning and executing the annual fundraising event, known at the time as the Hands of Hope auction. Since we were writing the next chapter of a 35-year-old organization, refining the strategy and messaging, we spent some time looking in the archives, carefully sorting through what had and hadn’t worked well in the past as we prepared for the future.

One of the ideas we unearthed in the dig was the “Box of Hopes and Dreams” component of past auctions. Many years prior, artists had hand-painted wooden boxes, and in the boxes were notes from our clients — both children and adults — about their hopes and dreams.

One member of our board, who’d been around long enough to have seen many of our annual events, showed us the Box of Hopes and Dreams on his credenza and talked about how he felt every time he saw it. In that one simple item he had a tangible reminder of how his support for our work helped make hopes and dreams come true for people he would probably never meet. It inspired him to keep working, keep helping, keep dreaming of a better future for all people.

The ability to imagine a future and better version of oneself is, according to several research studies, an asset that can contribute to moving from poverty to economic self-sufficiency. Dreams, paired with more practical things like food, housing, and safety, are fuel. Dreams feed momentum.

We brought back the idea, albeit in a slightly different format. Volunteers hand-painted wooden birdhouses, and the theme of that section of the auction was “Help Dreams Take Flight.” In the little round opening of each birdhouse we planned to insert a rolled-up note from a client (child or adult) about their dreams.

As the auction date drew near, we had far more birdhouses than notes. I knew it wasn’t likely or even appropriate to get a note from every client, but I was surprised by how few there were. I asked about it during our weekly staff meeting, wanting to know more about how people were approaching the conversation and asking for the notes. How had we done it in the past? What was different now?

“The people I’m working with don’t have dreams,” one therapist finally offered. “They don’t know how to dream, can’t imagine beyond the basic, practical needs of right now. That’s always been true for some people, but now it’s true for so many more.”

That’s the effect of trauma, stress, and unmet basic needs, including — and possibly most importantly — lack of loving support and human connection.

But before you go thinking that this situation describes only “other people,” people you drive by at freeway intersections or see behind dumpsters at the coffee shop, consider another story.

Earlier this year, I was working with a group of highly educated, well-resourced professionals on a change management process. They were stuck, and I wasn’t making much progress. With a colleague’s help I decided to try a loosely structured Appreciative Inquiry exercise, starting by asking each member of the group to identify one cherished memory from the past that they dreamed of repeating in the future.

At first, I was met with silence. Then someone said: “Honestly, thinking about the things I enjoyed in the past just makes me overwhelmingly sad. I don’t have any dreams for the future. I’m just trying to get by one day at a time, and that’s hard enough.”

We’re dealing with trauma, stress, and unmet needs, particularly the lack of loving support and human connection. And “dreams” as a word is a long-inequitable and complicated term — dreams deferred, and dreams denied.

It is easy, perhaps, to think of dreams and dreaming as an individual activity, something each one of us does, or doesn’t do, all in the privacy of our own individual minds.

But dreams aren’t solo work. They’re too risky, require too much vulnerability for anyone to dare have one without the companion belief that something — or someone — will be there to soften the fall if the dream doesn’t come true. Loving, supportive human relationships are the safety nets that allow the risk of dreaming.

Each of us has the power to be that safety net for the people in our lives, our intimate partners, our children, our family members, our colleagues, and our friends. Harnessing that power sometimes requires self-compassion and healing first. We have to be present for ourselves before we can be present for others.

Love begins at home, metaphorically and literally. If we are truly to “reimagine” Memphis, then we must ensure every child, every parent, every person has what they need to make dreaming possible in the first place.

Jennifer Balink is the executive director of Kindred Place, a counseling, coaching, and education center for confident parenting and healthy behaviors.