Trustee for LAH and Associate Professor of Drama at Liverpool Hope University, Zoe Zontou specialises in socially engaged performance and the role of the arts in addiction recovery. She has published a new book, available to purchase now. We were lucky enough to find out more about her work.
Performing Recovery explores how theater and performance can reimagine addiction recovery as a creative and collaborative cultural practice.
The book draws on 20 years of research and collaboration to investigate how people in recovery use artistic expression to challenge stigma and build new forms of belonging. Through case studies such as the Addiction Recovery Arts Network, Fallen Angels Dance Theatre, Portraits of Recovery, small performance adventures, the Pink Flamingos Project, and WilL Dickie’s White Sun, it reframes vulnerability as a source of creativity and connection. Combining theoretical frameworks with practical insights, the book demonstrates how socially engaged performance makes recovery visible, valued, and understood in new ways.
This book is ideal for artists, researchers, healthcare professionals, and students in performance studies, applied arts, social work, and addiction recovery programs, it will also appeal to anyone interested in creative expression, community arts, and social justice.
- Can you tell us about your research and practice? How has this inspired your new book?
My research journey began in my home country of Greece in the early 2000s. As a recent Theatre Studies graduate from the University of Patras, and through my involvement in artistic circles, I became increasingly aware of how common narratives of intoxication are within creative cultures. This led me to question the relationship between the arts and substance use.
A key influence during this time was my friendship with “Maria,” a woman in recovery from heroin addiction. She became one of my first teachers in understanding the lived experience of recovery. Her belief that “the arts are powerful, they can change people’s lives” stayed with me. Through her experiences navigating treatment programmes in Greece, and her emphasis on art as part of sustaining recovery, I began asking questions that continue to shape my work: Where are the voices of people in recovery within our cultural landscape? And how can theatre support both the retelling of recovery stories and the process of challenging stigma?
At the time, the cultural representation of lived experience of addiction recovery, were either largely absent or presented in overly simplified ways, often as quick or linear processes. This matters because addiction is frequently framed in reductive terms, as either a moral failing or something to be heroically overcome, leaving little room for the complex, ongoing realities of recovery. My work responds to this gap by exploring how socially engaged theatre can create space for more complex and authentic narratives. It began with a simple question: what happens when people in recovery are given the opportunity to create theatre and perform their own experiences? What shifts when someone in recovery steps onto a stage?
Over nearly two decades, my research and practice have developed at the intersection of addiction recovery and performance making. From early projects in Athens to my current work in the North West of England, I have worked across a range of contexts, including rehabilitation and detox centres, outreach services, and peer support groups. This has included collaborations with pioneering organisations and artists in recovery such as the Addiction Recovery Arts (ARA) Network, Fallen Angels Dance Theatre, Portraits of Recovery, small performance adventures, Vita Nova, and WilL Dickie, among others.
More recently, in collaboration with the Everyman & Playhouse Theatres in Liverpool, we have been developing a creative hub for people recovering from alcohol and drug use. This initiative provides a platform for artists in recovery to develop and share their work, recognising them as an important and active part of the city’s cultural landscape.
These experiences have enhanced my understanding of recovery as a relational and cultural process. As someone without lived experience of addiction recovery, and as a researcher working across different cultural contexts, I approach this work with a strong sensitivity to questions of vulnerability, belonging, and the ethics of representation.
This book brings together these strands of research and practice. Drawing on collaboration, creative work, and lived experience, it explores how performance can hold space for recovery stories in meaningful and transformative ways. In essence, it reflects my ongoing learning about how socially engaged theatre can open up new perspectives and support a collective reimagining of what “recovery” means. At its heart is a question that continues to guide me: what can people in addiction recovery teach us about different ways of being in the world?
- Can you tell us more about your work in Creative Health and how you approach this in your book?
Creative health is at the heart of my work, both in practice and in research. I approach it as a field that recognises the vital role of creativity and cultural participation in supporting health and wellbeing, not only at an individual level, but also within communities and wider social systems.
In the book, I explore how creative practices, particularly theatre and performance, can support recovery by fostering connection, identity, and a sense of belonging. These are central concerns within creative health, which moves beyond clinical models of care to consider the social, emotional, and cultural dimensions of wellbeing.
Creative practices offer vital spaces for people to express lived experiences, challenge stigma, and imagine new possibilities for themselves and their futures. Within a creative health framework, this kind of engagement is not seen as an optional extra, but as a meaningful form of participation that can contribute to social connectedness, and sense of belonging. Theatre, in particular, creates collective spaces where stories can be shared, witnessed, and reinterpreted, allowing individuals to move from isolation to visibility.
The book positions these practices within the broader creative health agenda, highlighting how participation in the arts can support recovery in ways that are relational, embodied, and culturally situated. It shows how creative work can enable people to reconstruct identity beyond the label of “addiction,” and to reclaim ownership over their own narratives.
I argue that cultural participation should be recognised as an essential component of recovery. This involves seeing engagement in the arts not only as creative expression, but as a way of amplifying lived experience, reshaping dominant narratives around addiction, and expanding how recovery itself is understood. In this sense, creative health provides both a framework and a language for understanding the value of this work. Fundamentally, the book advocates for a broader, more holistic understanding of recovery, one that fully integrates creative health approaches and acknowledges the role of cultural engagement in both personal transformation and in shaping the wider cultural fabric of our society.
- What was your favourite chapter to write and your favourite case study of practice?
My favourite chapter to write was Pink Flamingos: Vulnerability, Maternal Action and Recovery. This chapter explores a creative project I initiated in Liverpool with women in recovery, focusing on motherhood, care, and vulnerability.
It was a particularly meaningful experience because it brought me back into facilitating practice after some time, and allowed me to reflect on my own vulnerabilities as a practitioner. Working with the women in the group was incredibly inspiring. We built something very special together. What started as a creative project has now grown into a support network where we continue to support each other, especially around motherhood.
A particularly joyful moment was when Emma Wilkinson, who helped set up the group, recently welcomed her baby boy. It felt like a shared moment of celebration for all of us, a reminder of how creativity, care, motherhood and recovery are deeply interconnected.
- What is one thing you want readers to take away from your new book?
I want readers to leave with a different sense of what creative recovery actually means.
The dominant story about addiction recovery is still too narrow and it tends to focus on abstinence, and clinical outcomes. What the people I have worked with over twenty years have shown me is something far richer, more complex, and fundamentally creative. I invite readers to consider what vulnerability might make possible when understood as a collective and relational practice, something shared, embodied, and continually formed through connection with others. At the heart of this book is creativity as a central condition of recovery itself.
Through creative expression, people in recovery often discover new ways of relating to themselves, to others, and to the world around them. In doing so, they open up more expansive ways of thinking about care, interconnection, and belonging.
What I offer in this book is an invitation to rethink recovery as a creative, generative process. Recovery, at its best, is joyful. It is life-affirming. This book is an attempt to honour that.
- And finally, what inspires your work: what have you seen recently that has inspired your work in this area?
Two things have stayed with me.
I recently saw Waiting for Godot at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool, with Matthew Kelly and George Costigan, directed by Dominic Hill. Returning to that play felt timely. There’s something in its patience, its insistence on waiting, on being present, that speaks directly to what I understand about recovery. We live in a culture that wants quick fixes and measurable outcomes. Waiting for Godot is a reminder that some of the most important human experiences unfold slowly, in the pauses, in the company of others.
The second is Katherine May’s book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times (2020). May writes about those seasons of life when we must withdraw in order to repair ourselves. The people I work with have taught me the same truth, that there is wisdom in retreat, not failure. Like the turning of the seasons, our winters and summers are simply the ebb and flow of life. The invitation is not to fight that, but to move through it with grace, and ideally, with others alongside us. Both the play and the book remind me why the arts matter so much in recovery. They give us permission to slow down, to feel, and to find meaning in the difficult times.
With thanks to Zoe for this wonderful interview. Contact Zoe here.