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Introduction
As you might imagine, this section was never expected or considered when the book was originally conceived. No one could have predicted that what at first seemed to be an inconsequential flu-like illness in a city in China would turn into a world-wide pandemic, infecting millions and killing hundreds of thousands. No one expected the international lockdowns that occurred across the globe in 2020 into 2021.
This part of the volume developed organically out of the writings of various contributors; it was not asked for or required, but was a storied response. Stories are influenced by the world around us and the world is influenced by the stories it hears. We therefore begin this volume by offering a small selection of responses to the pandemic, partly as a tribute to the many professionals around the world who have fought valiantly against this disease and to the many who have lost their lives and the families they leave behind.
Clive Holmwood begins by sharing his personal experiences during the early part of the lockdown in the UK in the spring of 2020, with all the uncertainties it created, and considers it from a dramatic storied perspective. This is followed by Drew Bird’s comparison of the stories of Siddhartha and Captain Tom in Chapter 2. Captain Tom became a folk hero in the UK in 2020 by doing 100 laps of his garden by his 100th birthday, hoping to raise a few thousand pounds. He eventually raised millions for the UK Health Service, was knighted by the Queen and became a symbol of the National Health Service’s fighting spirit. Mary Smail then compares her imaginal world of ‘The Deathlands’ to our experiences of Covid-19. Following this Aurora Piaggesi and colleagues share their ground-breaking research of storytelling during Covid-19. Their story is particularly apt, coming from Italy, which the world focussed on as an early hot spot during the unfolding of the pandemic in the spring of 2020. Finally, in Chapter 5, we finish with a short thoughtful piece from Arjen Barel in The Netherlands, who considers that the coronavirus should not be our only story. And as we write this introduction at the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, with coronavirus vaccines beginning to be rolled out, we sincerely hope that the coronavirus will not be our only story.
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Introduction
As an academic and practitioner part of my role is to write academic articles and books, besides carrying out research. My personal escape from this academic rigour has often been zombie apocalypse and disaster novels and movies. Action adventures where individuals or small groups of survivors move cautiously through urban landscapes decimated by disaster; empty streets and empty shops, that show the last remnants of a society that once existed. Recently I have begun to live, and still live, the reality of these fantasy dramas, in a way neither I, nor anyone else, could have expected.
Setting the drama – the dramatic context
The skies above my house are clear of all the vapour trails of aeroplanes in the spring sky; almost all air travel has ceased. Streets are eerily quiet, with almost no cars on the road, especially in the evenings when the eerie silence is deafening. The UK government has announced unprecedented billion-pound bail-outs for companies and workers as millions stay at home. Our Prime Minister, after delivering daily addresses to the nation from 10 Downing Street, went into self-isolation and narrowly escaped with his life after spending two weeks in hospital in intensive care. This is surely the plot and storyline for a zombie apocalypse movie or novel; but it’s not, it was my current reality in the spring of 2020. We were reeling to make sense of what it meant as the semblance of normal society lurched towards fear and anxiety. The perfect setting for a drama or dramatic story.
The meanings of drama
Elam (2001) suggests that drama is a form of fiction or narrative created for theatrical representation, although he differentiates more specifically between ‘drama’ and its more formal representation ‘theatre’. Theatre is a more formal depiction of what takes place between performer and spectator, usually in a specific venue set aside for theatrical events. Drama is therefore a more fluid and flexible narrative – it can happen anywhere and is less reliant on the actor–audience relationship or the theatrical auditorium. Traditionally the meaning of the word drama is derived from the Greek word ‘ “drao”, which designates the performance of a ritual’ (Csapo & Miller 2007 pg. 121), literally meaning a thing done or performed. Therefore, any action or movement could be considered ‘dramatic’.
The pioneering dramatherapist and progressive drama educator Peter Slade (1954) considered the notion of drama from a child’s playful, creative, developmental and improvisational perspective. Whilst Jennings describes the notion of ‘dramatic truth, (being) like poetic truth … another type of truth’ (italics original) (1992 pg. 19). When we enter a playful dramatic space, we enter a heightened world which contains its own innate truth, tells its own stories and is separate to that of the real world story. Jennings also sees drama more as a form of ritual as described by Victor Turner (1982) – spaces that are transitional and liminal, that are in the real world but set apart from it. I would argue these spaces are much less well defined than the more traditional theatre spaces that separate actor from audience and can happen anywhere.
From a dramatherapy perspective the drama ‘is’ the therapy (Jones 1996). The act of doing drama is therapeutic in its very nature and could be seen to link to the Aristotelian notion of the purging of emotion or ‘catharsis’ (Janko 1987), being a central process for any audience watching a dramatic act when we ‘do’ an act of drama. We have the potential to purge our emotions or feelings through watching the dramatic act. Story and all its forms such as fairy tale, myth and legend are also central to this drama/therapeutic dichotomy and can be seen to hold the structure in which a dramatic event and cathartic experiences can unfold. Pearson et al. (2013) consider that myths contain and evoke strong feelings and memories which in some sense allow us to find ways of coping with our current situation, similar to the Jungian notion of the ‘Collective Unconscious’ which I will also consider later.
The dramatic world of Covid-19
Elam describes the notion of the actualisation of the dramatic world, suggesting that we access dramatic worlds in a conceptual way. ‘Possible worlds are realized when our actual world changes so as to become them’ (2001 pg. 99). He describes this notion of the transformation of the here and now into some kind of other worldly state – ‘the dramatic’ – suggesting that some worlds are ‘explicitly remote and others which are presented as hypothetically actual constructs’ (italics original) (2001 pg. 99). Like the zombie novels I read in my leisure time – the novel, the words on the page, in my view, act as distance between reality and fantasy. This new dramatic world of coronavirus is not hypothetical – it is a reality, and we might struggle to distance ourselves so easily from it.
What followed, in reality, over the coming weeks in the spring of 2020, as the virus spread in lightning dramatic form, was a series of intertwined stories neither I nor anyone else had fully processed. We were being encouraged to work from home. As we moved into March the government suggested that we should not have mass meetings, not go to pubs, sporting events or concerts. The notion of working from home and social distancing were being considered. March 18th 2020 became my final day at university. All schools, colleges and universities closed on Friday March 20th, despite the government insisting 48 hours earlier it was not on the agenda. This distanced ‘drama’ had now changed as my world changed. I was no longer seeing a drama or dramatic story from afar, I was no longer reading a zombie apocalypse novel, I was a leading protagonist in my own actualised apocalyptical drama. It is therefore difficult to connect to emotions from an Aristotelean cathartic point of view, as that requires some element of distance so we can witness the drama and emotionally respond to it, as if we were an audience. As protagonist in this dramatic story, there is no time to stop, think or feel. This appears to make sense from what I heard anecdotally from others in my various Skype and Zoom conversations. So many people kept saying they could not comprehend, think or make sense of the current situation. There was no dramatic distance, so we couldn’t.
The drama of story, destructiveness, reductionism & isolationism
The story unfolded further as I, as a protagonist, had to begin to work from home. One of my first online seminars to students was on the notion of destructiveness (Dokter et al. 2011). Students were confused, anxious about the impact of lockdown on their ability to complete their studies, their college placements and the impact upon their future careers. It is interesting that I was drawn to myth as a way of beginning to make sense of our situation, as Pearson et al argued earlier. Dokter et al explore in their opening chapter the notion of Freud’s death instinct – Thanatos (2011 pg. 11), who in Greek mythology was considered the god of death and destructiveness. We were all inadvertently being drawn into a classic dramatic story of life and death, without having the distance or space to respond fully to the emotions created. In reality people were literally fighting for lives in hospitals.
Jung, whose work is very pertinent to many in the arts therapies world, was particularly interested in the notion of dreams. The uncertainty of the world around us was almost a lived drama conveyed through a nightmare. Jung said prophetically:
From a dramatherapy perspective, one could argue this is Jung’s ‘Collective Unconscious’ at its most literal and dramatic – an unseen virus spreading throughout the very DNA of all humankind, that was completely unknown to us till a few months earlier, had no antidote and could be deadly. Yet it has come from us and is part of us. I could offer no certainty to my students about our current or future circumstances. I could only acknowledge the new landscape in which we were all currently living and admitted I had no answers, why should I? We all had to live and learn from the uncertainty of living in a ‘not knowing’ state that we as therapists have to inhabit with our clients on a regular basis; and hope the meaning will eventually emerge out of the chaos.
One could argue from a reductionist and isolationist perspective that much of our understanding of the Covid-19 pandemic is gained from TV. We have witnessed the drama of the British government giving daily briefings. Usually the Prime Minister (or other senior government Minister) at an embossed dais, or dais with buzz words on them such as ‘stay alert’, flanked dramatically on either side by the Chief Medical Officer and an expert professor. The very mechanism of television is reductionist, a rectangular flat screen, on the wall or in the corner of a room, distances us somewhat from the reality of the situation; and is also the same place where we watch fictionalised dramas in our home. The sombre wooden panels of Downing Street, the UK government crests on the daises, the union jack behind the ‘stay at home’ slogans, and the sullen tones of the speakers, could almost be mistaken for a scene from a Shakespearean tragedy; an oration of a king or prince. It reminded us of Jennings’ notion of drama as a form of ritual, at 5pm each day the country stopped to listen, as if expectantly awaiting the next episode of a historical TV drama, ...
