Pip Wright

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

Since I’ve been working with singing, I’ve had the good fortune to train for Singing for the Brain for people living with, um dementia, and their carers. And then after a few years based on that, um and uh after going on a course with the School for Social Entrepreneurs, um, I was able to set up Breathing Space Singing, um and that’s a singing group for people with chronic lung health conditions, and I understand it was one of the first in the country.

Benefits in quality of life are enormous and we have lots of individual anecdotes and stories, maybe someone who hasn’t sung for 14 years, or someone who didn’t go out before who’s now going for walks. Umm and from my side I’m really passionate about… so if creative opportunities come up for example, we’ve… we’ve just done a project about celestial navigation locally, um, which involved song writing, so I insisted and was delighted for Breathing Space Singing to be one of the groups involved so that when- especially something health wise happens to someone that they don’t get defined by the condition with which they’ve been diagnosed but are still recognised as creative, um artistic parts of the community. It really motivated me how much singing is health giving, and when somebody is diagnosed with a chronic condition, that they often drop out of their social, cultural, artistic activities, umm… and on top of this, a couple of people I… had been singing with me for a few years became quite ill because their chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and one of them in fact was the nurse teacher who eventually help… helped me as a stall volunteer to set up Breathing Space Singing. Um so… and I’ve seen both of those individuals, um really improve and I had a… a spontaneous letter from one of their GP’s saying that this woman had the best, uh lung capacity test she’d had for 20 years, so you know, we were seeing it help on a… on a umm… clinical level. But the biggest differences is on a social and um… a sort of quality of life level– people making new friends, having fun really.

 And I think anybody can be maybe a catalyst as well, I mean um when there are… when there was the reclaim the night uh marches here, by all means I was happy to give my time to teach some songs that were suitable to invite anybody to come along and sing, and we had women and men on those marches, umm… it’s always a delicate line to respect people’s different points of view and to… and not to be too self-promoting, um but when it comes to human rights um safety safeguarding I don’t think many people would have problems with that. So, using… um… I don’t sit down and think ‘oh we’ll use singing to do this’, but it’s such a joyful thing to do when we had umm… anti-war rallies or whatever here, or the march for women we would sing… we would sing on those activities.

Umm… I mean I don’t consider what I do is complete… is is particularly special, I think it’s what Cornwall has always done looking after its local community but maybe just acts as a bit of a catalyst, so you could see in a way that the healthier singers are able to support and help people in less well health keep singing, keep being creative, keep being active.

Notes:

Link to Pip Wright’s website, Breathing Space Singing:
https://www.pipwright.co.uk/breathing-space-singing.htm