Reclaiming Joy: Comedy as a Strategy in Socially Engaged Practice

In 2025 I was awarded an Arts Council England DYCP to undertake a period of artistic research into humour, play and performance.

After several years focused on trauma-informed and socially engaged practice, I wanted to reconnect with qualities that had become a little buried under the weight of advocacy: humour, irreverence, physical play and creative risk.

As this period of development evolves, I am increasingly drawn towards physically-led forms of comedy, clown and Dark Clown, and back towards improvisation and the live relationship between performer and audience. I am exploring failure, vulnerability, visibility and the edges of my own practice: what happens when I relinquish some of the control and competence of a highly trained body, stay with uncertainty, and allow myself to be seen trying, failing, listening and responding in the moment.

This DYCP period is also opening up questions about returning to performance as a mid-career female artist: how I communicate through the body I have now, what presence and power might look like at this stage of my career, and how humour, darkness, absurdity and play might become part of an evolving performance language.

This research feeds directly into Practice of Play, a space I am developing for artists to explore physical play, improvisation and creative mischief without the pressure to produce an outcome. It invites failure, challenge, confusion and uncertainty as part of the creative process and reflects something increasingly central to my own practice: reclaiming joy not as an escape from difficult things, but as another way of encountering them.

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