HEALING Arts Scotland ’26 – a week of informative events — opened on Monday June 15 in Aberdeen on hospital premises. The Suttie centre for Teaching and Learning in Healthcare, housed within Aberdeen Infirmary, situated the mini-festival’s initial day positively amid the realm of arts medicine.

Events will continue through the week in a progress via days spent in Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh. The topic of healing arts is broad. Each day will assume a particular form, relative to its locale and set-up. Healing Arts Scotland (HAS 26) presents an opportunity to expand thinking and develop initiatives through dialogue with cultural speakers and interviewees.

Collaboration and implementation are hot HAS topics. Anyone wishing to contribute their energies in the field is welcome to engage with mass presentations and smaller break-outs, in consideration of better-informed project development or participation. Working artists must book a day, but get to attend for free. Other freelancers make a small contribution. All emerge nourished.

The framework for Monday was lent by Citymoves – Aberdeen’s national dance agency, which is centrally funded (with charitable status) to address the artform’s creative and social remit year-round. Citymoves’ own working premises — the repurposed anatomy rooms at the rear of Mareschal College – carries its own health-based implications.

By my own analysis, dancing circulates our natural opiates (endorphins), adrenalins, steroids and many other goodies; engaging our senses and perceptions via physical connection with patterned actions. All this may comprise a ticket to physical healing – in tandem with medication perhaps, or as a bulwark against the onset of illness. Not that this axis was overly vaunted by Citymoves’ personnel on the day. Organised events were generously allowed their own course.

It’s inspiring when expertise is vividly and accessibly aired. The lived experience of committed workers — be they active in prisons, in education or right across voluntary sectors — chimes with all present, under the Healing Arts Scotland umbrella. A buoyancy of participants was enabled here. We could light upon new notions, catalysed by many who solidly knew their stuff.

My lightbulb moment came as a prison warden spoke to illuminate how knowledge of an inmate would signifiy in the process of rehabilitation. Personal material that is withheld in conventional interview but that finds safe expression in creative writing or movement is vital in this context. Members of participating prison services are thus brought to a position of welcome and encouragement regarding the activities of skilled cultural workers.

The idea to end Monday afternoon with a planned song and dance rendition, set to inhabit the Suttie centre’s public atrium, was redirected by the withdrawal of permission. Instead, the dancing and singing manifested under our noses on the carpet-tiles of the lecture theatre. Citymoves’ youth dance group and a local community choir joyously held their own. Their manoeuvre illustrated where we actually are: not fixed in a best-case scenario, but fluidly ad-hoc, in the right vein.

Runs in Scotland until June 19, for more information see: healingartsscotland.org; runs in Birmingham June 22-26 for more information see: healingartsbirmingham.org