The presentation: “We want to help … How?” offers our experiences in assisting refugee and dissident artists in The Green Room in 2022.

The Green Room is a center in Cologne, Germany, that provides a wide range of support systems for performing artists. Since our founding in 2020, we have been responding to performing artists’ personal crises, e.g. injury, illness, burnout, loss of work, as well as the difficult challenges arising from the pandemic and its long shadow into cultural patterns and societal structures.

 During the first days of Russia’s war against Ukraine, we cautiously send out messages : “We want to help … How?”.

 Within 24-hours of the first message, over forty Ukrainian artists responded. Their responses challenged our assumptions on what programs, systems and structures can help artists facing grave societal and personal crises. In 2022, we assisted over 120 Ukrainian performing artists along with several Russian dissident artists. These high-stakes therapeutic interventions provided us with valuable insights into the potentials for artistic healing and community-building.

The Green Room’s programs are based on the “bio-psycho-social-(spiritual)” model of health advocated since the 1970s by the World Health Organization (WHO). We offer psychological and career counseling, and courses and workshops designed to support performing artists’ somatic and psycho-emotional health. We also advocate for artists’ rights and well-being. Our work with Ukrainian artists in extreme situations as new refugees expanded and clarified our views on the possibilities for artistic work to create beneficial therapeutic feedback loops between the artists and the communities that emerged to support them and derive support from their artistic offerings. We began setting up more and more opportunities for free artistic expressions and exchanges. In this situation, our roles as health practitioners evolved away from being providers of active interventions. Instead, we learned how to build effective frameworks and contexts for the artists and their communities that could empower, support, and contribute to meaningful engagements with each other. We found that this type of scaffolding enabled the artists to create their own therapeutic communities and contexts that were perhaps more effective in this context than our traditional therapeutic services.

This presentation explores aspects of agile and responsive leadership in cultural settings, particularly those responding to dire societal crises. We explore how conducive cultural settings assist artists develop expressions with the potential to heal. We focus on the role of cultural managers as facilitators, creating optimal conditions for artists to flourish.

Presenter: Heather O’Donnell, founding director of TGR The Green Room, psychologist (M.Sc.) former concert pianist, and an artistic-systemic therapist in-training (cert. DGSF 2024).

TGR The Green Room

TGR The Green Room (TGR) is a non-profit social enterprise founded in October 2020 in Cologne, Germany, for the comprehensive support of performing artists (especially musicians, dancers, theater professionals). With offerings from the areas of performance research, somatic training, psychosocial care, and artistic performance coaching, TGR offers performing artists individually-tailored support systems. TGR's offer combines health promotion with formats to strengthen artistic practice with a focus on process-oriented self-exploration. Since 2022, TGR has been offering various types of residencies, initially for artists fleeing the war in Ukraine and now to a broader spectrum of international artists. Our artist-in-residence program assists artists in becoming professionally integrated into the German cultural scene, while supporting them in their artistic development and creative sustainability. TGR has been selected for a patronage by the German Commission for UNESCO, and has partnered with several organisations such as the Goethe Institut, Artists-at-Risk (Finland), the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. TGR The Green Room was founded by the American pianist and psychologist, Heather O’Donnell, as a resource center for artists experiencing difficult phases in their careers. Since founding in 2020, The Green Room has assisted over 200 artists, and held over 60 performances showcasing our resident artists for an collective audience of c. 2000 audience members. The Green Room has presented lectures and talks to such organisations as the Gürzenich Orchestra, the European Network of Cultural Centers, and the Performing Arts Medical Association, making the case for increased awareness of artists’ mental and physical health for career longevity and creative self-actualisation.

Heather O’Donnell

Heather O’Donnell began piano lessons at age five, and was fortunate to build an active and vibrant career as a professional pianist until the age of 37. In the latter stages of her pianistic career, long-standing injuries and chronic pain made her work as a professional musician unsustainable, so she began establishing a second career path as a psychologist and specialist in musicians’ health. Since then she has developed programs to assist performing artists throughout the lifelong process of health recovery, development and maintenance.

 While transitioning from her performance career, she studied Psychology (B.Sc.) at the Freie Universität in Berlin and received a M.Sc. in Prevention and Health Psychology at the SRH Fernhochschule, as well as a certificate in Musicians’ Health at the Kurt Singer Institute / Universität der Künste in Berlin. She is trained as a MTTC Mindfulness teacher (teachers: Christopher Titmuss and Ulla König), and is currently in-training as an artistic systemic therapist (DGSF). She works with musicians who suffer from playing blockages and disorders and educates young performing artists on the development, maintenance, and recovery of health. She also assists musicians and other artists in restructuring or changing their careers following injury, illness or for any other reasons.

O'Donnell gave lectures at the International Symposium of the Performing Arts Medical Association (PAMA) at the Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City (2017), at the World Piano Conference in Novi Sad (2016), and at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Rheinsberg (2015). She has been a guest lecturer at the iArts School in Hangzhou, China, at the New England Conservatory in Boston, the Ostrava Music Festival in the Czech Republic, and a jury member at the Concours international de piano d'Orléans (2012). Additionally, she gave workshops, lectures and masterclasses at numerous universities, such as Columbia University, Manhattan School of Music, Cornell University, the Robert-Schumann-Musikhochschule, the Lebanese Higher Conservatory of Music in Beiruit and at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. She taught in the Humanities Department of the Eastman School of Music until 2019 and gave regular workshops on musicians’ health and practice strategies at the Eastman Institute of Music Leadership.

Images from our programs in 2022: