Performance for Care advocates for the integration of arts and creativity within healthcare education and professional development. The collaboration is led by Dr Alex Mermikides (Guildhall School of Music & Drama) and Dr Sara Donetto (King’s College London), and it has a particular focus on performance (theatre and dance) in nursing.

Our first symposium, scheduled for 27thMarch 2020, has been postponed in order to protect the safety of participants and speakers during the COVID-19 epidemic. Therefore, we have launched our collaboration here – at performanceforcare.com – on the date of our planned meeting. Some of our speakers have kindly provided digital material for this online platform.

PERFORMANCE FOR CARE ONLINE ‘EVENT’ 27th March

We suggest that you view our pages sequentially, starting from Policy and Practice, then exploring the examples of practice in the Showcase section, and finally listening to responses from our multi-disciplinary expert panel (Discussion). This will take around 90 minutes, but feel free to dally or skip ahead (you can always come back later). There are no ‘live’ elements to the website itself, but we strongly encourage questions for our presenters, comments and responses as we watch. Follow us on @perform4care, tweet your responses and comments (using the hashtag #performanceforcare) or leave a comment on the Discussion page. If you experience technical difficulties viewing the website please try changing your browser or clearing your browsing history. And if you would like to stay in touch, please register for updates on Get Involved.

Please note: because of Government advice on social distancing, some of these videos were filmed at short notice with limited technology – please forgive the ‘home-made’ quality. Thank you to our speakers and to Anna Tanczos for helping us with this material. We are also very grateful for the invaluable help and creative input of Emma Keeling, Alicia Bloundele and David Ottley.


Performance for Care is a collaboration between Dr Alex Mermikides (Guildhall School of Music & Drama) and Dr Sara Donetto (King’s College London).

Dr Alex Mermikides is a theatre researcher investigating the intersections between contemporary performance, healthcare and medicine. Her books include Performance and the Medical Body (2016) and Performance, Medicine and the Human (2020), both published by Bloomsbury). She runs Chimera, an arts/research network founded with an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Through this network, she creates performances on medical themes, often working in collaboration with healthcare specialists and patients. Her work has been featured in The Guardian, The Times Higher Educational Supplement and on This Week (BBC Radio 4). 

Dr Sara Donetto is a social scientist with a background in medicine. She is a lecturer at the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Palliative Care at King’s College London. Her teaching focuses on qualitative research approaches and on the supervision of doctoral students. Sara’s research interests include: pedagogical innovation in healthcare professional education; critical understandings of person- and relationship-centred care; and collaborative approaches to the design and delivery of healthcare professional education and practice.