Magdalena Schamberger
A multi-year grant totalling £282,000
Magdalena received her Breakthrough Fund grant when she was Artistic Director and CEO of Hearts and Minds, a Scottish arts-in-health charity which she co-founded in 1997. The company aims to improve the experience of people in hospital, hospice, residential and respite care by using the performing arts to encourage communication, interaction and laughter. Its Clowndoctors work with children, while its Elderflowers use the performing arts to creatively engage with elderly people living with dementia across Scotland.
Magdalena’s grant allowed her to take time away from the company, while remaining its CEO, in order to pursue a number of new avenues to further develop her work and artistic approach. Individual creative research and mentoring including research trips abroad enabled her to explore the ways that other performance languages can combine to allow a new kind of performance interaction with people with dementia. This led in 2017 to her creating Curious Shoes, a collaborative performance experience that can be shared by those living with dementia alongside their family members and carers. It also allowed her to develop an experiential dementia awareness training programme, Artful Minds, for artists from all disciplines, which she has been delivering in varying settings since 2016.
In 2017, Magdalena decided to leave Hearts and Minds and to hand the company over to new leadership in order to take forward this new phase of her own artistic work as an independent creative collaborator. In spring/summer 2019, following the initial realisation of Curious Shoes she produced an eight week-long tour of Curious Shoes with support from Creative Scotland, which visited theatres, community centres and care homes throughout Scotland and England. She continues to work as a theatre director, teaching artist and consultant, and is developing further projects to take forward her vision and unique approach to working with people living with dementia. Magdalena’s Breakthrough grant concluded in January 2019.
