Collaborations Within and Between Dramatherapy and Music Therapy

Experiences, Challenges and Opportunities in Clinical and Training Contexts

Amelia Oldfield, Amanda Carr

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781785921353
• eBook ISBN: 9781784504021
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy Counselling
• Index: Psychology

In this insightful book, Oldfield and Carr draw together persuasive arguments for combining aspects of music therapy and dramatherapy, whilst retaining their unique facets.

Building on the many links between music and drama and the compatibility between the two disciplines, the authors explore how artistic aspects of each therapy can be drawn on to create fresh ways of working. This approach enriches the practice of professionals working to support people with special needs, people recovering from trauma and social deprivation and a wide range of other service users. Despite the significant overlap in music therapy and dramatherapy techniques, this is the first book to directly explore the vast potential of elements of the two disciplines being brought together.

Covering a range of different perspectives and practice contexts, this book demonstrates just how much the professions can offer each other both from a clinical perspective and from the point of view of training therapists.

Chapter 1

‘IF MUSIC BE THE
FOOD OF LOVE…’

The Dance of Music and Drama in the Early
Years of Creative Arts Therapies

SUE JENNINGS

This chapter is about my journey through dance, drama and music to eventually becoming a dramatherapist. It was in the very early days of arts therapies in the UK and led to my meeting with budding music therapist Julienne Brown. It was a meeting of two rather unlikely people who were at the beginning of second careers in dramatherapy and music therapy. Julienne Brown was a flautist from South Africa who was completing a music therapy training run by the dynamic Sybil Beresford Pierce. I had been practising my own idea of dramatherapy, which was influenced by Peter Slade and his early work in drama in education, plus my experimentation in a psychiatric hospital and in a special school. My first career was as a professional dancer and actor, touring in musicals and repertory plays. Julienne was a performer and taught music. Then came the day that changed our histories: it was 1971 and both Julienne and I had enrolled for the first Introductory Course at the Institute of Group Analysis…

Part One: My journey through music and drama

I was born into a musical family where importance was placed on listening to classical music as well as playing a musical instrument. This was before television, so we played gramophone records and listened to the radio. My young childhood was at Appledore in Devon (during the war my doctor father was moved to different places to mind the practices of doctors away at the war front). I attended my mother’s dancing school and had my first panic attack performing on stage as a baby butterfly! I was three years old and it was all too much for me, I burst into tears and rushed off stage to find my mother. I was also roundly reprimanded for asking in too loud a voice if we could have fish and chips for supper, in a quiet moment at my brother’s school concert. My first beginnings in music and performance were not auspicious.

When I started piano lessons a few years later, taught by a family member, I first became aware of my own ‘instant freeze response’; this teacher would sigh when I made mistakes, and they were very expressive sighs, so I froze even more and made more mistakes. In the end it stopped as ‘not working out’, and although I really wanted to play the piano, it was a great relief not to have these lessons, the ‘Sighing Times’ as I would later call them! It took many years of theatre and therapy to really understand the instant freezes and Sighing Times, and they are both related to my ambivalent relationship with music and drama.

To fully understand this I really had to grasp the dynamics of my own family; this was extremely difficult in a family where one was not allowed to make any criticism. My parents’ opinion, especially my father’s, was law and not to be challenged. I squirmed at school when friends criticized their parents. It was not malicious but a very healthy teenage challenge as one emerged with one’s own ideas and opinions. Any divergence I had to keep to myself and buried, which is why until adult life I parroted the opinions of my mother and father in religion, politics, social life, friends and artistic culture! Together with this was the giving of roles; for example, ‘Your sister is the musician, you are the dancer’ (despite my disastrous debut some years earlier!) or ‘You must not play hockey as you are a dancer and it could be dangerous.’ My father sent a humiliating letter to the headmistress of my school where he declared I was not allowed to play dangerous sports. This of course led to an increase of the internal freezes as I was bullied by fellow sporty pupils and games teachers alike.

The complexity of my father’s poverty and the lack of resources for any higher education for his five children is too lengthy to be discussed here. Suffice to say that it was reluctantly agreed that a dance career would not succeed, even though I had just completed two tours in a musical and a revue. Instead I was to focus on theatre, but there were no funds for drama school or university. However, this was translated into ‘You don’t need drama school if you are good enough.’ The reality was that my father refused to fill in a means test form as he said it was an invasion of his privacy. So I ended up with some theatre-in-education work, touring Shakespeare to convent and private schools and some occasional repertory theatre roles. In between, I worked on my brother’s farm, as I had to support myself. Deep down, I hadn’t a clue what I wanted to do with my life. I was expected to be a big success in the theatre and also to settle down and get married.

A seeming pointer happened when a fellow drama enthusiast said that her father would like me to run drama sessions on the ward in the local psychiatric hospital. He was the superintendent of a large institution and was certainly innovative for his time. I had to wear a uniform and be called Nurse Jennings and do nursing duties as well as the drama club. It was a start with a difference and something that stayed at the back of my mind when I went on to work as a drama teacher in a special school. I had no knowledge at the time that this could lead to the actual creation of a new career, not only for me but also for others.

Meanwhile, I tried every therapy, you know, to try and get to grips with my frozen insides. All I knew is that when I was seeing great theatre, there would be a shift. And when I was later performing solo shows on themes that were relevant to me, there was also a shift. My own performances were becoming my therapy. I write about this journey in Dramatherapy and Social Theatre: A Necessary Dialogue (Jennings 2009).

I was making progress with my understanding of frozen landscapes and realized that someone with my upbringing would feel unable to fight, but might occasionally try flight, and that the freeze response was my coping mechanism from an early age. When others were angry or critical, or as a response to trauma, of which there were several, my child-like exuberance needed curbing. The concept of fight or flight in dangerous situations was first identified by American physiologist Walter Cannon and then popularized in his book The Wisdom of the Body in 1932. More recently, freeze was added to the fear response range of behaviours. With fight or flight, there is a sudden burst of energy that allows us to cope by either fighting or running away from danger that has been detected by the amygdala part of the brain. In contrast, the freeze response is different in that the energy slides away and we either play dead or faint, our blood pressure drops and so there is less bleeding if we are wounded. My responses to frequent fear were freeze or faint, and I suspect there was a symbolic flight with frequent moving of dwellings.

But now it was time to reach out and see who else was in the budding field of arts therapies. I had taken a theatre group across the Berlin Wall and met the unforgettable Berliner Ensemble. The same group gave workshops and therapeutic performances within a German hospital for people with severe learning difficulties, much to the astonishment of the staff. The late Gordon Wiseman and I were to return to this hospital and tour to other hospitals in Belgium and Holland as our momentum for remedial drama was growing. We were both comfortable with this term as it accommodated both education and theatre. It was a difficult transition to calling it therapy.

But now I took an unexpected step towards some understanding of psychotherapy, and I registered for the introductory course at the Institute of Group Analysis (IGA). It was unexpected for me, as an original dancer who worked mainly with non-verbal approaches in drama.

Part Two: First meeting

So this gathering was at Montague Mansions, a very posh address in London W1, where innovations in groupwork would develop…

One could sense there was a ripple of expectation, maybe tinged with anxiety, as members of the first big group arranged themselves in a circle. The group analytic greats, Malcom Pines, Robin Skynner and Patrick de Mare, were all there as facilitators. This was a major step in the development of group analysis and opened it up to many more people from many backgrounds.

Julienne caught my eye across the group and winked; there was a feeling of comradery. We found each other at coffee break and introduced ourselves. Friendship was instant, and somehow it made the strangeness of the course and the tedium of having to sit still more tolerable. The course was very interesting and we met a diversity of people from theology, psychiatry, medicine, occupational therapy, speech therapy, nursing and education, but we were the only people from the arts therapies so were regarded as interesting specimens. But Julienne and I commented privately, just like Hamlet: ‘Words, words, words.’

I was totally unprepared for the spats in the small group and squirmed as brickbats were hurled; to this day I have never understood why. My small group was facilitated by Ilse Seglow, one of the few women teaching on the course at that time. She was colourful, passionate and dynamic, and very pro the arts. However, my position was less than comfortable when I discovered my own analyst had been analysed by Ilse and he was still dealing with rather obvious negative feelings towards her! As a novice in a psychoanalytic milieu, I often felt at sea, quite lost, and, because I did not get it, felt for a long time that I was stupid. My analysis was a tempestuous journey, which I write about elsewhere. Again I had to ask myself why I was in a verbally dominant and hierarchical personal therapy, when I was a drama and theatre person who believed in improvisation above all else.

Julienne and I supported each other, and our friendship was also stimulated by a rather colourful psychologist, David Mumford, who used to arrive on a yellow bicycle. The three of us were seen as quite rebellious as we challenged the formal rules, including not being supposed to contact others outside the course. Not meeting was unrealistic anyway as we were writing a paper and preparing talks. At the end of the first year neither Julienne nor I wanted to pursue a full training in group analysis although we agreed this introduction had been very valuable, especially as we both worked with groups in clinical settings at the time.

However, something very special happened. Consultant psychiatrist Patrick de Mare, the facilitator of the big group at the IGA, asked us if we would like to work at his near-legendary Friday Club, which was one of the earliest psychiatric social clubs. De Mare was a firm believer in the arts and arts therapies. He would be found at weekends in various cafes in Hampstead wearing a beret and playing his accordion. Our appointments were some of the earliest on record of creative arts therapies in a clinical setting. The Friday Club took place at St George’s Hospital, Hyde Park. The evening would start with a large group for sharing amongst members, then everyone would go into a smaller group for dramatherapy, music therapy or art therapy. Some members stayed with one group; others moved from group to group. Occasionally we collaborated for a performance. Members wanted to create a pantomime and chose Aladdin, with the idea of inviting children from a local special school. The event was boisterous, to say the least, and a strong memory remains of the man who played Aladdin desperately batting away with his guitar fairy cakes that were being hurled by the children.

Julienne and I were both keen on developing improvisation in our respective art forms and would also work together on where and how they could overlap and feed each other. I would stay with her on Friday nights instead of commuting back to Hertfordshire in the dark, so we could spend ages developing ideas and forms. For example drumming rhythms would lead into the creation of healing rituals, with some affinity with the primitive stamping of the god Pan. This contrasted with dream-like flute playing where a dance-drama could be improvised. This in turn was reminiscent of the conflict between Pan and Apollo in the ancient Greek story. It mirrored the later antagonism between the different arts therapies that still exists in some areas. However, it was a boon to work with someone who fundamentally believed in collaboration rather than competition. This also mirrored my later experience with art therapist Ase Minde, a collaborative relationship that continues even now.

It was also important that we had the chance to work with such a giant in philosophy and original thought as de Mare. His thinking was in leaps of Gothic arch proportion while everyone else was fiddling around with bits of decoration on the sculpture. His deep understanding as a psychiatrist, together with his compassion, group understanding and creative artistic skills, allowed us to work with a unique human being (de Mare 1991; Lenn and Stefano 2012).

Julienne and I continued to explore our work together under the approving eyes of de Mare, and there was also art therapy with Elspeth Weir and a dance group for everyone after the therapies had finished. Julienne gave me much confidence in my own musicality and she enjoyed the ritual drama, which was my speciality. We combined movement, rhythm and drumming in integrated groupwork. We explored fairy stories such as ‘Red Riding Hood’ and the ‘Three Bears’, and Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It is my favourite play, one that resonates so many therapeutic stories and journeys. We also improvised stories written by members and encouraged them to write their own poetry.

However, there was change about to happen. It was a shock when we first heard: somehow our special arts therapies family was about to disintegrate. The valuable site at Hyde Park Corner was to be sold and the hospital and social club were moving to Tooting. Neither Julienne nor I was able to commute that far. Very sadly, we said goodbye to the amazing participants and staff, and especially to de Mare.

Part Three: Musical intelligence

As our work at the social club was drawing to a close, I was approached by Hertfordshire Education Authority to contribute to a special nursery that was being set up for children from one to five that had learning difficulties or physical challenges, or who were struggling developmentally. Working with such small children and toddlers was testing and in complete contrast to our adult work. It was also innovatory for the authorities to consider such resources for young children. I think it would be hard to find such an initiative now.

We had a group with singing games and percussion and encouraged the nursing staff to join in. The children responded as soon as they heard Julienne’s flute, accompanied by my drum. We contained and explored and were unfazed when touch was obviously appropriate. We were untrammelled by health and safety rules that dictate our professional lives now. The nurses were slowly learning that everyone’s contribu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword by Rebecca Applin Warner
• Introduction
• 1.   ‘If Music Be the Food of Love…’: The Dance of Music and Drama in the Early Years of Creative Arts Therapies
• 2.   Dramatic Role Play Within Improvisational Music Therapy: Joey’s Story
• 3.   Notes of Recognition and Connection: Music Within Dramatherapy When Working with Adults Who Have Challenges in Their Verbal Capacity or Are Non-Verbal
• 4.   The Use of Puppets in Music Therapy Sessions with Young Children and Teenagers
• 5.   ‘You Are the Music While the Music Lasts’: Songs, Memories and Stories Within a Story
• 6.   Humour, Play, Movement and Kazoos: Drama in Music Therapy with Children and Families
• 7.   Collaborations and Transitions Between Schools and Arts Therapy Modalities
• 8.   Love Songs for My Perpetrator: A Musical Theater-Based Drama Therapy Performance Intervention
• 9.   Lullaby for Butterfly: A Dramatherapy and Music Therapy Project for Young People Who Have Experienced Social Deprivation
• 10.   Past and Current Influences Between Music Therapy and Dramatherapy in Collaborative Training, Practice and Research
• 11.   Music Therapy and Dramatherapy Students Improvising Together: Using Playback and Other Forms
• Reflections
• About the Contributors
• Subject Index
• Author Index
• Join our mailing list
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• By the Same Author