Culture Club | Pieces and Parts!

What do Dolly Parton, Shakespeare, whales and Creature Comforts all have in common?

Culture as a source of inspiration and mental wellbeing

by Andrzej Stuart-Thompson

What began as a couple of taster sessions in December has now grown into a lively weekly online group full of curiosity, conversation and cultural gems.
One of East Surrey Community Connections’ newest group activities focusses on the inspiring, comforting, and connection-forging powers of culture.

Originally founded by co-ordinating team members Andrzej Stuart-Thompson, Angie Muscio and Becky Freeman, and now supported by Jo Brown (with playful visual design and promotion by Chon Donnelly), Culture Club was created in response to the people who use our service, who had an appetite for something new.

The group explores cultural gems from around the world, including an eclectic mix of novels, short stories, poems, films, artworks and music. Now meeting weekly online, Culture Club opens up fresh avenues for thought and dialogue, while gently nurturing a shared sense of connection and collective wellbeing.

We began, last December, with a couple of taster sessions.

The charismatic whale

The first of these took us on a surreal journey to the depths of the ocean, as we considered how the world’s largest and perhaps most charismatic mammal, the whale, has been represented in different ways across music and poetry.

In particular, we considered the experimental electronic music of American techno-feminist singer and artist Laurie Anderson (1947-) alongside the poetry of Portuguese eco-feminist writer and academic Ana Luísa Amaral (1956-2022).

Anderson’s song ‘Pieces and Parts’ (taken from her album Life on a String, released by Nonesuch Records in 2001) carries us on a surprising arc from the imagined uncovering of a huge whale skeleton by slaves on a plantation Alabama, in the year 1842, through to an exposé of the songwriter’s personal reflections on the difficulties of grasping what a whale might be.

Together, we became our own ‘pieces and parts’ — forming a beautiful mosaic of shared ideas, reflections and imagination.

This mysterious ‘giant snow hill’ is only glimpsed when his fins flash and his tail flickers upon the ocean’s surface, and he has a complex and hidden emotional life that is inaccessible to humans. This theme is taken up again in Amaral’s poem ‘The whale: about the heart and about beauty, or perspectives’ (from her late collection World, published in English translation by New Directions in 2023), in which the poet, wandering through an exhibit at a natural history museum – a fibreglass replica of a whale’s heart, hollowed out as a playground for children – reflects upon the long history of whale civilisation on a planetary scale, as well as the more intimate question of whether a whale’s heart may ever have broken.

Stepping for a moment beyond a human-centred frame, Culture Club members used the song and poem as stimuli for imagining what it might be like to be a whale. As one attendee put it, we also pieced together our own beautiful mosaic made of ‘pieces and parts’, of semi-formed ideas, speculations, and personal perspectives regarding what whale culture might look like and what this species means to us.

We think this is a wonderful encapsulation of what culture-based group activities can bring us in the broadest sense.
In Culture Club, we form a collective imagination that is broader, richer, and more nuanced than any single person’s unique take might be on its own – it really does become a greater good than the sum of its individual parts, with more healing and uplifting properties too.

Attendees felt their minds decompress and revel in imagining all kinds of new sounds, images, and ideas

Attendees felt their minds decompress and revel in imagining all kinds of new sounds, images, and ideas: whale-y divas performing long-distance operas, underwater cetacean raves, and the beautifully vulnerable lives that must once have given flesh to the animal carcasses now monumentalised in museums – storehouses of scientific knowledge, imperial loot, and civilisational ‘progress’, whose artefacts have largely been stripped of their emotional backstories. Let it suffice to say that we may never think about whales or bones or museums in quite the same way again.

We equally began noticing the positive things that happened when we allowed the lyrical ambiguities of Anderson and Amaral’s works to remain unresolved, as we explored the spaces of unknowing between the lines. The kind of uncertainties we typically find in imaginative literature and music concerning our own lives and the lives of others, whether human or animal, are truly worth embracing. Far from being a problem, they can enable our imaginations to become free-spirited and non-judgemental, as we leave all of our preconceptions behind; we never know to what new questions, possibilities, and discoveries such uncertainties may lead us.

The kind of uncertainties we often find in imaginative literature and music are truly worth embracing. They allow our imaginations to become more free-spirited and non-judgemental, as we leave our preconceptions behind — and we never know what new questions, possibilities and discoveries may emerge.

A Christmas Carol

As the festive season drew near, Culture Club’s second taster session gathered around Dickens’ classic novella A Christmas Carol (1843) – a story so entwined with Christmas that it has come to shape how many of us imagine the season itself.

We explored how Dickens, writing quickly under financial pressure, nonetheless produced what he proudly called “a little whole”: a compact moral fable about generosity, community, and the possibility of change. The group reflected on Scrooge as an exaggerated figure of capitalist miserliness, emotionally iced-over and cut off from others, but also noticed his peculiar wit and sympathetic qualities, making his journey of redemption feel earned and full of pathos.

We traced the novella’s ghostly structure back to a longer winter tradition of fireside supernatural tales, noticing how Dickens uses haunting not to frighten for its own sake, but to unlock feeling: the Ghost of Christmas Past reawakens childhood wonder and the emotional powers of reading itself; the Ghost of Christmas Present reveals fragile and imperfect forms of joy and care which take place across different social worlds, in language crackling with warmth and aliveness; and the Ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come confronts Scrooge with his mortality, as he is forced to ponder what kind of life might be worth living. Together, these phantasmal encounters helped us to think about Christmas not merely as a season of sentimentality, but as a willed pause in time – a moment of presence in which compassion, imagination, and the hope of change are briefly allowed to take centre stage.

We further considered whether thinking about Christmas less as a calendar event and more as a state of mind might in fact help these positive values to permeate throughout the whole year.

We considered whether thinking about Christmas less as a calendar event and more as a state of mind might in fact help positive values to permeate throughout the whole year.

Culture Club evolves….

Following an enthusiastic uptake in these taster sessions, this safe and welcoming online group has since gone on to stage a series of thoughtful and dynamic weekly discussions, orientated towards imaginative escapism and shared reflection.

We began the new year with a session on the Shakespearean sonnet, approaching poetry not as a test of expertise but as an invitation to notice rhythm, repetition, and emotional “twists and turns”, and to balance our first impressions with gentler, second readings. Participants enjoyed discovering how this tightly-wrought form, a kind of miniature panic room or else a tranquil sanctuary on the page, can become a space for working through issues of love, jealousy, self-doubt, and healing.

Our Cultural Icon session on Dolly Parton then shifted us into the world of popular music and performance, where glamour meets vulnerability.

We explored how Parton playfully bends stereotypes, writing her own disarming punchlines to other people’s misogynistic quips, stylishly using her hyper-feminine image to empower her brand and rise to stardom in a man’s world. We equally considered her philanthropy, from her gifting of books to underprivileged kids through to her surprising funding of a Covid-19 vaccine. Above all, what captivated us was her crafting of songs that transform personal hardship into shared feeling. From “9 to 5” to “Coat of Many Colours,” the group reflected on how popular music can hold both political tensions and everyday tenderness within the same breath.

Most recently, our first Film Club session took us into the quiet, mossy world of Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019) – a slow, intimate Western about friendship, marginal lives, and fragile forms of care on the edges of American capitalism in its early days. The film’s gentle pace invited us to linger with gestures, textures, and silences, prompting discussion about alternative masculinities, small-scale solidarities, and what it might mean to seek kindness in a world structured by colonisation, extraction, and unequal power.

Looking ahead, our upcoming sessions promise a rich and varied journey across time, genre, and feeling: from the luminous medieval mysticism of Hildegard of Bingen and her Canticles of Ecstasy (session on 11 February), whose visionary music and language invite us into a sensuous, spiritually charged way of encountering the world, to the speculative horizons of sci-fi short stories by E. M. Forster and Ted Chiang (18 February), which gently unsettle our assumptions about technology, empathy, and what it means to be human.

Film Club continues with the warmly eccentric claymation world of Aardman Animations’ Wallace and Gromit and Creature Comforts (25 February), celebrating hilarious everyday voices, eccentric forms of companionship, and the comfort of cheese and crackers.

Then we turn to voices of liberation in the poetry of Maya Angelou and songs of Nina Simone (4 March), where art becomes a means of resistance, resilience, and collective hope.

Next, we will linger with the quirky animal and plant poems of Adília Lopes (11 March), which draw our attention to small lives and overlooked forms of beauty.

We’ll follow this with a light-hearted Film Club session devoted to comedy shorts (18 March), exploring how laughter can soothe, surprise, and draw us closer together.

Our programme culminates in an exploration of reimagined Greek myths in contemporary novels and the visual arts (25 March), where ancient stories are reworked to address modern questions about power, gender, and fate.

Why is culture good for our wellbeing?

One question remains to be answered, in this roundup: ultimately, why is culture good for our wellbeing?

One answer comes from the scholar Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, who suggests that culture does more than give us meanings to interpret; it can also bring about what he refers to as “moments of presence” – felt, bodily experiences of being in touch with the world in the here and now… Music can wash over us, a poem’s rhythm can steady our breathing, a painting or film scene can linger in our senses, furnishing our minds with wonderment.

These moments don’t simply tell us what something means; they help us to experience texture, mood, atmosphere, and connection. In a world that bombards us with news, advertising, and information overload, and that often pulls us into constant explanation and analysis, such experiences of pure pleasure, which have neither an obvious purpose nor an easy rationale, can be grounding and restorative. They offer brief pauses in which we are absorbed, attuned, and present – with ourselves, with others, and with the material world. This sensory “nearness” can gently nourish our wellbeing, helping our minds to decompress and giving our emotions a space in which to move, flow, and evolve.

We would like to take this opportunity to extend a heartfelt thank you to all of our wonderful group members for their thoughtfulness, enthusiasm, and openness.
Everyone is welcome to join, and no cultural expertise is needed – only curiosity.
We share our own personal reflections on a new cultural gem as a group, every week, and new voices are always warmly invited to join us.

We hope to see you there!  Find out more: ccwaythrough.org.uk/events/culture-club-weekly

Article: Andrzej Stuart-Thompson
Visuals: Chon Donnelly