Burnout in the health-care industry is real. A March survey by the Harvard Gazette reported alarming rates of compassion fatigue and post-traumatic stress. Fifty-six percent of nurses reported burnout. Forty-one percent reported an intent to leave the industry altogether.

If left untreated, compassion fatigue and burnout can lead to long-term emotional trauma, depression and suicide in health care providers, especially in the aftermath of COVID, according to the National Institutes of Health.

And Tara Rynders of Evergreen, who is both a professional dancer and a registered nurse, is employing some unexpected tools to combat those trends.

“I use movement arts and play as a way to connect to ourselves and each other,” said Rynders, who conducts group workshops that offer the arts as an entry point into healing from burnout, traumatic stress and what she calls “moral injury.”

They play games. They move their bodies like 6-year-olds. They laugh. They sing. They release stress.

“I felt free,” said Spring Marsh, a registered nurse who took part in Rynders’ “(Re)Brilliancy” workshop in Oakland. “I was able to move around without gravity holding me down. When I was able to roll around on the ground and just be like a kid again, it was amazing.”

Rynders has a lot of capitalized letters following her name, like RN, MFA, BSN and BA. That’s “Registered Nurse,” “Masters of Fine Arts,” “Bachelor of Science in Nursing” and “Bachelor of the Arts.” It’s a safe bet that she might be the only person who can claim that particular bowl of alphabet identity soup. But it makes her uniquely suited to reimagine the future of nursing through the arts and performance.

This fall, Rynders will be offering workshops to more than 600 Kaiser Permanente nurses in Northern California alongside Denver-based team members Ashley Cornelius, Dr. Clare Hammoor and Maria Schimpf. The starting goal, she said, “is to create spaces of courageous care for oneself and others.”

For a lot of professional nurses, “adult life is an unending process of making peace with breaking even,” said Dennis Kim, another nurse who has taken the workshop. “We don’t always get the victory or the outcome we intended. But one of the lessons we gleaned from this exercise is that the camaraderie between you and your fellow travelers is what lasts, and is enduring, and can fuel you up for the next charge. It was a beautiful experience.”

Rynders has been using her dance background to help her fellow nurses since 2009, when her sister suddenly went from being a healthy 26-year-old who loved playing roller derby and being a mom to lying in an acute coma. Rynders put her academic life on hold to care for her full-time.

“That experience ushered in some very intimate and special moments that only suffering can bring,” Rynders said. “At night, I would put on music and dance around her hospital room to make her laugh. I saw the positive impact of play and movement in the midst of traumatic experiences, and how deeply joy and grief are interwoven in our sufferings.”

In 2015, Rynders became the patient. She was passed out on a gurney when a nurse called a Code Yellow – that’s the one right before Code Blue, when your heart has stopped. “A nurse grabbed my hand and said, ‘I am here, and you are going to be OK,’” Rynders said, “And that moment changed the entire course of my life.”

Though she has now been an RN for nearly 20 years, becoming a patient for the first major time made Rynders realize how incredibly lucky she is to be a nurse.

“In that moment, I was reminded of the impact we have as nurses and health care providers,” she said. “I was reminded of the joy and the sacred calling that comes from caring for another human being in the midst of suffering.”

When she recovered, Rynders began conducting research that made it evident to her that, for many nurses, compassion fatigue and burnout were stealing the joy that comes from caring for another human being

“When nurses have no joy, our patients suffer – specifically Black, Indigenous and patients of color,” said Rynders. That’s when she founded The Clinic.

In 2018, Rynders collaborated with local playwright Edith Weiss and co-directors Jadd Tank and Lia Bonfilio to create a unique and immersive theater piece called “First, Do No Harm” that played out down the hallways of her very own workplace at the time – Rose Medical Center. The public was invited along to experience the story of burnout told through the perspectives of nurses, hospital liaisons and family members, accompanied by mobile music and dance.

“Audiences were allowed to explore life and loss through the eyes of both the cared for and the caregivers,” said Rynders, who is also married to Tim Rynders, bassist for the longtime Colorado band The Knew.

Rynders’ foundational goal moving forward, she said, is to help nurses “to rediscover the joy and beauty found daily in our profession, so that they can give patients the best care possible so that they feel seen, heard, and cared for.”

Editor’s note: For our 2023 fall arts preview, the Denver Gazette is profiling emerging artists who are introducing new ideas, voices, skills and approaches that are changing the ways audiences are experiencing and engaging with the arts. Look for the seventh installment in our series Saturday.

Meet the artist: Tara Rynders

• Hometown: Reno, Nev.

• Home now: Evergreen

• Your genre: Immersive and experiential dance

• Affiliated arts collective: The Clinic

• How can people experience your work? We are just completing a short film called Kaiser Permanente (Re)Brilliancy Workshops, and we will be hosting a viewing party and panel when it is ready.

• What is the change you would like to see in our cultural ecology? I wonder about artists getting the care they need. It has been my experience as an artist that it feels like a hustle – a push to get funding to do our craft and to find spaces to receive it. What does it look like to receive care as artists? Also, equitable funding. The foundations that are distributing funds should reflect our diverse population of artists.

• Shout out another local artist: Ashley Cornelius is changing and saving lives through her poetry and her work as program manager of RESTORE, which provides peer-to-peer support to all Denver Health personnel who experience distress.

• How do we check out your work? Go to theclinicperformance.com to learn more about The Clinic. Here are links to information about Kaiser Permanente’s (Re)Brilliancy Workshops; The Clinic Workshops and a Kaiser Testimonial video.