Drama therapist and client: An examination of good practice and outcomes

Abstract

From its origins in remedial drama in the 1960s (Jennings, 1984), drama therapy has progressed to where it now addresses a wide range of psychosocial issues, from psychiatric problems and learning difficulties on the one hand to the enhancement of managerial and interpersonal skills on the other. Its rapid development testifies to its effectiveness in these various fields, but the very rapidity of this development raises certain problems that need to be addressed if it is to continue to progress as a unified therapy and not sub-divide into a number of separate specializations. Many of these problems stem from the diversified nature of what might be called its parent discipline, drama. Drama is a tension in unity among dramatists, directors, actors and audience, and each of these groups can be highly individual in approach and response. Dramatists present their personal views of the world; directors interpret these views in the light of their own concepts and predilections; actors develop their roles according to their particular talents and temperaments; audiences respond in the context of their own life experiences, temperaments and value and belief systems. Of all the creative arts, drama is thus in many ways the most varied and the most idiosyncratic. Further, with the exception of its close relatives opera and dance, it is the only live creative art that employs real people as its primary medium of expression and that presents human emotions made raw and visible before onlookers who are themselves emotionally caught up in the experience unfolding before them. From the earliest rituals through to the Greek theatre, the medieval mystery plays, the European drama of the 17th Century and our own contemporary theatre, it therefore presents us with an extraordinary fluidity of ideas, philosophies and creative devices. Moreover, because drama, at the point of performance, is as ephemeral as the events of life itself, it has a particular elusiveness that makes the task of holding it in perspective even more difficult. It is hard to define any of the creative arts in a way that adequately conveys their essence, but in the case of drama such definition seems at times to be beyond our reach. As drama is so varied and so difficult to pin down, it is inevitable that the same is likely to apply in some measure to drama therapy. The strength of individual drama therapy sessions can even be said to lie in their ability to offer the uniqueness, immediacy and personalized relevance of improvised theatre. In addition, each drama therapist, though trained within a common idiom, develops his or her own therapeutic style in a way more analogous to that of the good dramatist or theatre director than to that of the psychotherapist working in more traditional fields. And drama therapy clients, both as participants and as active observers of each other, share something of the uniqueness of individual actors and individual audiences. In the light of this richness and variety, re-