Dramatherapy and Social Theatre

Necessary Dialogues

Sue Jennings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415422062
• eBook ISBN: 9781134101672
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Dramatherapy and Social Theatre: Necessary Dialogues considers the nature of drama, theatre and dramatherapy, examining how dramatherapy has evolved over the past decade and how the relationship between dramatherapy and social theatre has developed as a result.

In this book Sue Jennings brings together international dramatherapists and theatre practitioners to challenge, clarify, describe and debate some of the theoretical and practical issues in dramatherapy and social theatre. Contributors cover topics including:

• dramatherapy in communities
• ground rules and definitions
• cross-cultural perspectives
• dramatherapy with adoptive and foster families
• research with professional actors.

Dramatherapy and Social Theatre is illustrated throughout with case vignettes providing examples of how theatre and therapeutic processes can be brought together. It will be valuable reading for both professionals and students involved in dramatherapy and theatre studies.

Part I
Dramatherapy and social theatre

A debate of ground rules and definitions

Introduction

This section is very much the exposition of the subjects that follow in the other sections. It lays out the main debate, some of it critically and much of it challenging to any of our assumptions about theatre, therapy and the status quo.

The opening chapter by Elektra Tselikas takes us through a journey from ‘social to theatre to the individual and to the theatre again’, offering us an overview of the connections and power of social theatre for social and individual transformation and integration. She draws on both theatre theory and neuroscience to present us with a new paradigm: perhaps there is no social domain within which we can explore relationships and dynamics, maybe we create the social out of our theatre practice.

Anna Seymour (Chapter 2) lays the basis for contemporary dramatherapy practice in the UK, and draws on the recent literature of social theatre. She challenges the idea of the collapse of boundaries between theatre and life, so that life and art all become types of performance. She emphasises that dramatherapists have clinical responsibility to their clients by maintaining the boundaries that operate at an artistic and clinical level; dramatherapists engage in a paradoxical process that is at the core of their practice. Seymour has concerns that what is essentially an analogy between theatre and life needs to be kept as an analogy. The ‘theatre of war’ is not theatre; it may seem like theatre but it is war!

Guglielmo Schininà (Chapter 3) describes an overview of his social theatre work in the Balkans, Middle East and Sicily, mainly in war-torn settings. He describes his interventions as ‘psychosocial’ and goes on to say that it is important to integrate healing, participation and education, rather than splitting them into separate concerns. However Schininà is concerned that practitioners are not addressing the work that needs to be done on the self, at a personal level, in order to train skilled social theatre practitioners. In a sense he echoes, from a social theatre point of view, the dramatherapy perspective described in the previous chapter. And like the chapter that follows, he has concerns about the over-frequent use of the word ‘trauma’. Schininà’s policy of integrating some dramatherapy training into his programme means that the healing-participation-education perspective has a reality in practice.

James Thompson (Chapter 4) challenges both dramatherapists and social theatre practitioners in another sense. He has concerns about the imposition of values from western European cultures on to societies that have their own means of dealing with stress and tragedy. He describes how practitioners want to make people tell their stories rather than allow them the healing benefits of silence for example. Of course for clinicians this is where appropriate supervision would expect to address these issues. However, with my own experiences in Romania and Kazakhstan there appears to be no supervisory training in cross-cultural practice for dramatherapists (and play therapists) working in non-western settings. Thompson suggests that an often misplaced diagnosis of trauma can lead to an expectation that telling your story is the cure. However skilled non-psychotherapeutic practitioners would challenge that ‘personal telling’ is necessarily the most efficacious way to deal with trauma. Thompson’s critique is a timely reminder to practitioners in both disciplines.

Finally in this section, Claudio Bernardi (Chapter 5) discusses the ‘Dramaturgy of communities’, placing it in a historical context. He discusses the traditional ‘community’—the village, for example—where face-to-face interaction is possible. He contrasts that with global living, where a community is more to do with a common lifestyle, or people sharing a common purpose. He has created a complex social theatre intervention that includes both the ‘vision’ and the ‘action’ that are necessary to the dramaturgy of communities. He says that we need both the ‘I’ of the traditional society as well as the ‘we’ thinking in solitary communities.

The I and the we reminds me of the original work pioneered by the late Veronica Sherborne in her developmental movement. She emphasised that we learn about I and we by working against another body as well as working with another body. Dramatherapists more and more are realising that they can learn from theatre about the primacy of the body and that initially all roles are embodied (Jennings 2008).

Reference

Jennings, S. (2008) ‘Embodied Roles and Dramatic Play’, in S.Jennings, Neuro-dramatic and Attachment Development, London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

1
Social theatre

An exercise in trusting the art

Elektra Tselikas

Introduction

In this chapter, I concern myself with the connections of ‘social’ and ‘theatre’. I investigate new ways of looking at the ‘social’ and explore possible consequences regarding the relationships of thinking ‘socially’ and acting ‘dramatically’ or ‘theatrically’. Rather than trying to discuss existing definitions or to offer new ones, I present what seems to me a new mode of thinking the ‘social’ and connecting it to theatre practices. In that sense, the chapter has rather a theoretical orientation. I think that this is useful insofar as practice reports and accounts about empirical case studies abound, whereas theoretical attempts to grasp relationships and connections between theatre practices and the ‘social’ are rather few.

Before I go on to explore possible connections between the ‘social’ and theatre, it is necessary to present in a first section this new way of looking at the ‘social’. This will allow us to establish a common base on what we mean when we speak of ‘social’ groups, ‘social’ actions and so forth, so we understand how they can be related to theatre practices. In this first section, I draw mainly on Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT) (Latour 2005). In the second section I explore possible connections between the ‘social’ and theatre and I point to possible effects of these connections, hence letting theatre emerge as a powerful practice able to contribute substantially to what Latour calls reassembling the social. In the third section, I discuss recent results of brain research, based particularly on the work of Antonio Damasio (2003) regarding the neurobiological roots of feeling and their potential for transformation. These findings are important since ever more evidence is being presented about the roots of feelings in bodily experiences. I connect these findings to theatre practices and the resulting potential for living the ‘social’. I hope to have gone full circle by the end of the chapter, from the ‘social’ to theatre, to the individual and to the theatre again, and to have helped the reader gain an overview of the connections and power of social theatre for social and individual transformation and integration.

Section 1

Of the ‘social’

It is surprising to declare that there is no such thing as a ‘social’ context or a society providing the context in which everything is framed: ‘there is no social dimension of any sort, not “social context”, no distinct domain of reality to which the label “social” or “society” could be attributed’ (Latour 2005, p. 4). Such a thesis contradicts everything that sociologists have been fond of until now, positing the existence of a specific sort of phenomenon called ‘society’, ‘social order’, ‘social practice’ or ‘social structure’, a frame possessing specific qualities able to explain, reinforce, express, maintain, reproduce, or subvert what are believed to be ‘social’ phenomena, phenomena that cannot be grasped or explained by other disciplines. According to such an understanding, the social domain is a given; it does not only permeate other domains but also accounts for several dynamics—for example, relational or interactional—that take place in these domains. In such a mode of thinking, theatre—notably ‘social theatre’—can be practised in order to express, transform, integrate or subvert such ‘social’ dynamics or contexts.

Now, let’s see what if there is no given ‘social’ domain, indeed? What if there is no such thing as a society? If ‘social’ is not a glue that holds different elements together, but rather—according to this type of reasoning—is what is glued together by other types of connectors. In other words, social aggregates are not a given through which aspects of or dynamics in economics, linguistics, psychology, management and so on can be grasped, described or explained. Instead, social aggregates are rather resulting within the economic, linguistic, psychological or management sectors and should be described or explained by the specific associations provided by these sectors.

To the social theatre practitioner, these preoccupations will sound like hair-splitting debates, and maybe they are. Yet they have far-reaching consequences. One most important consequence is that if we conceive of the ‘social’ as a given entity we tend to see relationships, interactions and other ‘social’ expressions as given dynamics that result within the given ‘social’ entity. Hence, we concentrate our attention on these ‘social’ interactions before we concern ourselves with the types of connections between things that are not themselves ‘social’ and that exist within the mentioned domains, a much more fluid conception. Seeing the ‘social’ as a given entity with given dynamics is what social workers, counsellors, therapists and related professionals have been doing until now. They emphasize the importance of relations and interactions assuming that, if those are brought into harmony—for example through theatre practices—individuals and groups will function more appropriately.

In contrast to that, a view I would like to adopt here sees no given ‘social’ domain but only traces that are left by very specific movements that happen within particular types of connections between things that are not themselves ‘social’. The consequence of such a view is that it places the subject matter before the relationship. The ‘social’ emerges within contexts that are created through connections of elements that have no ‘social’ qualities in themselves. And hence, when intervening in such a context, we are concerned with tasks that aim at solving problems connected with the subject matter rather than with relationships. Through particular tasks, we create spaces that can become ‘social’. And this is precisely what theatre does. This is where theatre can deploy each ‘actor’ (human and non-human) so as to create spaces that allow for the ‘social’ to emerge. This is, indeed, the power hidden in theatre practices, as we discuss in Section 2 of this chapter.

Before I elaborate on these connections between assuming and solving tasks and the creation of spaces that let the ‘social’ emerge, I would like to invite the reader to have a look at what a ‘social’ group is, or can be, according to the view adopted here. Since the ‘social’ domain is believed to be peopled by ‘social’ groups, and social theatre is in some way related to ‘social’ groups, it seems necessary to take a closer look at these particular phenomena.

Of social groups

As the ‘social’ does not exist of and by itself, groups exist only by the traces they leave. As Latour points out, mapping the controversies in the formation of groups is more interesting and far reaching for the researcher of the ‘social’ than describing established connections since ‘group formations leave many more traces in their wake than already established connections which, by definition, might remain mute and invisible’ (Latour 2005, p. 31). Hence, visibility is the crucial point here, and, in order for the traces left by group formations to be visible, some items will always be present: ‘groups are made to talk; anti-groups are mapped; new resources are fetched so as to make their boundaries more durable; and professions with their highly specialized paraphernalia are mobilized’ to report about the groups (Latour 2005, p. 31). In other words, groups cannot be defined like other given objects through an ostensive definition but only through a performative one. Groups are made by the various ways and manners in which they are said to exist. This performative element supports group members and groups to ‘create’ and present themselves, to exist and to be visible. According to Latour ‘if you stop making and remaking groups you stop ha...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• Prologue
• Part I Dramatherapy and social theatre
• Part II Theatre, social theatre and change
• Part III Social theatre, politics and change
• Part IV Dramatherapy and social theatre in practice
• Index