A Dramatic Guide to Intimate Relationships
Introduction
Who am I? What do I want? How am I going to get it? In my professional career, I have found these questions to be the starting point for most actors studying the art of drama and theatrical performance. These questions enable an individual to live in a parallel universe, the world of the play. A glorious world it is, until the actor realizes he cannot live in it alone. Relationships within this world give life to the fantasy, and so an actor must explore his relationship with everyone involved in this created world, or else he will be considered a fraud. Being a great actor requires one necessary trait: the ability to tell the truth. The truth may be discovered within an individual’s relationships, a realization that sparks further exploration. It is this examination that fills the questions aforementioned with subtext and meaning. Once the role of the individual has been established, the creative work can finally begin.
A drama therapist approaches therapy much like how an actor chooses to act: it is a constant exploration of relationship patterns between individuals. In this paper, I will discuss drama as a creative arts practice known as drama therapy. Following a brief overview of intimacy, I will then present research that supports Developmental Transformations (DvT) in the drama therapy group. Finally, I will attempt to reveal how DvT in drama therapy establishes and maintains intimacy in relationships amongst group participants.
What is Drama Therapy?
“Creativity is the source of life” (Jennings, Cattanach, Mitchell, Chesner, & Meldrum, 1993, p. 180). The creative individual engages in play, humor, colors, and stories (Jennings et al, 1993). Once creativity is accessed, healing can begin to take place.
Drama therapy is creative healing. Jennings et al (1993) quote a 12-year-old boy who defines the alternative therapy simply and elegantly: “Drama therapy is about touching and playing with objects, drawing and telling stories, and making up plays about them. This lets you collect up and get out the frightening feelings from inside you, and doing all this helps you to be calm. I can’t explain it, but it’s got something to do with here,” as he pats the area around his heart (p. 184). As the boy alludes, drama therapy stirs deep emotional awareness. Furthermore, this dramatic approach to therapy is suitable for all ages, as it does not require insight to facilitate change (Butler, 2012, p. 88). It does, however, require a level of commitment to the work: active, embodied exploration of an individual’s relationships to others.
Group drama therapy gives individuals an opportunity to share with each other and work together, “as opposed to being individualistic, competitive, and closing off oneself” (Jennings et al, 1993, p. 169). Together, participants explore “their creativity, their energy, their problems, their aims, and their joys” (Jennings, 1992, p. 77). Since everything is shared on the drama therapy playground, relationships are inevitably formed. Because relationships are built in the context of the drama, exploration of these relationships becomes the world. This exploration gives birth to a rather profound level of intimacy, which will be discussed shortly. During a role-play, participants are said to share a “collective communal experience” (Jennings et al, 1993), one experience shared by all. This means that together, participants enter and exit the world they have created in therapy. This is a safe world that allows them an uninhibited opportunity to explore what may be vulnerable outside the therapy circle. Within dramatic reenactments, the group is aware of their subconscious: they know that the characters they have created are mere representations of their own wishes, “but the dramatic paradox enables them to say and experience far more” (Jennings, 1992, p. 77). This concept, known exclusively to drama therapy, is called distancing.
Distancing allows an individual’s psychological material to be examined “with an underlying safety net that it is only a story,” (Butler, 2012, p. 88). Distancing actually separates the individual from having a direct interaction with his/her conflict. In a group, dramatizations that use puppets, masks, or living sculptures (for example) create a layer of distance between individuals and also between the individual and his/her concern. Through the drama created by the group, participants explore the depths of this safety net with freedom to move to their intended point of vulnerability. “The person feels less threatened and more in control, with choices rather than ultimatums” (Butler, 2012, p. 88). Distancing in drama therapy gives individuals room to reflect (Jennings et al, 1993, p. 173) and space to heal without identifying the thing (Jennings et al, 1993, p. 180). By identifying roles and events and replaying them, distancing provides a variety of outlets for individuals to enter (Jennings et al, 1993, p. 180).
Drama therapy, like theatre, explores the role and the story of the individual. “Without role and story, theatre cannot occur” (Jennings et al, 1993, p. 176). Role and story, in the context of a drama, helps to define relationships amongst group members. When one knows his role (Who am I?)and his story (What do I want?), it is now a necessity to engage in an intimate relationship (From who am I going to get it?). In other words, it is the relationship to a fellow group member that provides an individual with his story (his desires). Drama therapy uniquely gives an individual the opportunity to explore the many roles he/she may play by providing time to reflect upon and modify these roles in some way (Jennings et al, 1993, p. 177).
Now that I have succinctly described a few key concepts of drama therapy, I would like to provide a brief overview of intimacy and how it is relevant in drama therapy groups.
An Overview of Intimacy
Yalom (2005) believes, “The chief concern of the group is with intimacy and closeness” (p. 319). He describes group therapy as a formative process, one that requires individuals to collectively progress along a series of stages. The third stage of group therapy is Development of Cohesiveness, a time where intimacy is established and trust is formed amongst the group (Yalom, 2005, p. 319). “Although there may be greater freedom of self-disclosure in this phase, there may also be communicational restrictions of another sort: often the group suppresses all expression of negative affect in the service of cohesion” (Yalom, 2005, p. 319). Because group work in drama therapy requires a considerable level of cohesion from the very beginning (Butler, 2012, p. 88), participants may bypass this desire-to-please effect as described by Yalom. Also, individuals participating in drama therapy communicate indirectly through the use of dramatizations. This ambiguous mode of communication makes emotional restrictions less likely to occur. Thus, drama therapy may enhance the closeness and intimacy of relationships both organically and creatively.
Yalom (2005) found in an experiential study that those individuals with “constricted emotionality may be threatened by the expression of feelings by others” (p. 245). They may have “difficulty experiencing and expressing their own emotional reactions” (Yalom, 2005, p. 245). Ironically, it is these individuals who gain the most and change most often as a result of their group experience, “even though they are significantly more uncomfortable in the group (Yalom, 2005, p. 246). Here it is relevant to recall the importance of distancing in drama therapy: through distancing, individuals can explore their own level of emotionality within the group context. Within the safety of the drama, they can explore their relationship to the expression of feelings by others. The active drama provides an opportunity to rehearse and explore both experiencing and expressing their emotional reactions. Drama therapy becomes yet another playground amongst many for individuals to discover and define intimacy.
Intimacy amongst group members develops with time and trust. Distancing allows exploration to occur, and it is the exploration that encourages intimacy. Actors would say that it is the journey that makes the destination worthwhile; in drama therapy, the journey is the exploration of relationships, and the destination is a greater knowledge of self, both individually and interpersonally. Robert Landy, an American drama therapy leader, describes the exploration of roles to relationships: “It is the in-between space where the greatest possibilities could grow and occur” (Jennings et al, 1993, p. 175). It could be argued that the in-between space is the process of exploration. I envision the process as a deep well that contains intimacy at its very core. A group who gathers one bucket and lowers it into the well together emerges a stronger, more unified group, because the heart of intimacy has been revealed. At this time, participants must make way for a new therapeutic goal: maintaining intimacy so as to deepen the bond of relationship.
Drama therapy explores the “looking-glass self,” (Jennings et al, 1993, p. 173), a philosophy that understands the self as an extension of self in relationships. In other words, you look at another person and see much of yourself in them. “I am self, I know who I am by virtue of looking in the mirror: that is, all other people in my social world and what they look like back, is a sense of what I am” (Jennings et al, 1993, p. 173). Drama therapists embody the looking-glass experience by dramatizing the relationships between group members as a way to further explore personal issues. Once group members connect on this creative, physical level, the bond of intimacy is even furthermore established, because a level of vulnerability has been achieved.
I have briefly discussed intimacy and its relevance to drama therapy. After giving a brief description of Developmental Transformations (DvT), an embodied approach to drama therapy, I will then attempt to explore the depths of intimacy further within this particular technique.
Developmental Transformations (DvT) in Drama Therapy
Although Developmental Transformations (DvT) is best understood when experienced, I will describe it in accordance with the experts. Most simply put, DvT operates on three basic principles: embodiment, encounter, and transformation. Individuals physically engage one another in the playspace – “an interpersonal field in an imaginative realm where the imagination infuses the ordinary” (Johnson, 1991, p. 289). The therapist draws attention to the body (Butler, 2012, p. 89), encouraging individuals to participate in group play, including “brushing up against [each other] in an encounter that gives all involved a chance to examine, explore, and release some of those ‘stuck’ patterns” (Reynolds, 2011, p. 297). A client must find ways to cope with the ensuing anxiety from experiencing the encounter (Butler, 2012, p. 89). “Transformation occurs as the action continually shifts and changes” (Butler, 2012, p. 89). Butler (2012) reports that transformations allow the group to confront and change defenses (p. 90) and rigidity, the lack of motivation to change (p. 90). The father of DvT, David Read Johnson (1991) wrote that transformations are essential to the psychotherapeutic process, evoking profound images, scenes, and characters that are often “very primitive and personal” (p. 290) in nature.
DvT operates under dramatic improvisations that “emphasize the use of developmental sequences of dramatic forms to facilitate a spontaneous flow of images within the client (Johnson, 1991, p. 289). Like Freudian free association, DvT looks beyond words, deeply examining movement, sound, gesture, and dramatic character (Johnson, 1991, p. 287). Through role-play, symbolic enactment, verbalization, and silent imaging (Johnson, 1991, p. 288), individuals “confront the choices made in the past and possibilities for choice in the present” (Johnson, 1991, p. 288). Yalom (2005) advises mental health professionals, “As long as you persistently direct the group from the non-relevant, from the then-and-there, to the here-and-now, you are operationally correct” (p. 162). Individuals participating in DvT have no choice but explore the here-and-now, albeit in an “unconventional” way compared to industry standards. Johnson (1991) poignantly describes the challenge of living in the present moment in DvT, “The process of being existentially real is to live with the acknowledgement of one’s state of becoming, to be in role and out of role at the same time, to be both player and audience” (p. 286). A DvT group explores this duality actively, freely, and most importantly, in relation to its fellow members.
DvT and Intimacy
DvT explores intimacy by way of conflict within the encounter of individuals. Yalom (2005) says, “If overt conflict is denied or suppressed, invariably it will manifest itself in oblique, corrosive, and often ugly ways.” An impasse is what DvT calls “a major interruption in the flow of therapy characterized by conflict” (Johnson, 1991, p. 289). Yalom (2005) argues that there are both negative and positive attributes of conflict; “its absence suggests some impairment of the developmental sequence,” (p. 364); finally, the perfect dose of conflict can be especially worthwhile in therapy (p. 364). Conflicts often reveal an individual’s more deeply laden anxieties and fears. In the course of DvT, group members are allowed “to flee the conflict by transforming the scene while remaining in the playspace” (Johnson, 1991, p. 290). They do not ignore the conflict. Quite the contrary, DvT participants challenge the conflict in real-time. Group members sense the intruder (conflict), and together explore the possibilities of progression. Unity and understanding are ever so important in this phase of DvT. At each moment of conflict, intimacy is reinforced by the unity of the encounter.
DvT elicits intimacy amongst group members most notably in the encounter itself. Therapists emphasize “the process of noticing, feeling, animating, and expressing” (Butler, 2012, p. 90). DvT seeks to slow down the communication process by encouraging group members to truly notice a difference in a partner, feel an emotional response to the difference, experience a physical, lively response, and then express a verbal response back to the partner (Butler, 2012, p. 90). Group members feel safe in the playspace, because proper communication patterns have been established, and thus intimacy grows and fosters. “The playspace in DvT also gives clients the opportunity to play out roles that might not otherwise be attributed to them,” (Butler, 2012, p. 91). Individuals explore these roles with group members in the encounter, strengthening relationships, enhancing intimacy, and providing a more meaningful understanding of self.
The encounter in DvT is live, constant, and indirect feedback, and has the potential to enrich intimacy with the flow of the improvisation. The encounter is safe enough for group members to explore their relationships in the playspace “without immediately challenging or agreeing with the expressed viewpoint” (Reynolds, 2011, p. 307). Group members discover playful and safe ways to explore negative emotions like anger and aggression, without having to act out in reality, (Reynolds, 2011, p. 299). Perhaps members also find “the group leader neither abandons nor rejects them for [negative] feelings” (Reynolds, 2011, p. 299), deeply enhancing the satisfying bond of intimacy between client and drama therapist.
Conclusion
This paper began by describing the drama therapy approach in detail. I attempted to give insight toward distancing, a unique drama therapy intervention that requires skill and intuition. I briefly overviewed the potential drama therapy for developing intimate relationships. Finally, I examined how Developmental Transformations (DvT) is utilized in drama therapy as a tool to explore, deepen, and thus maintain intimate relationships between individuals in a drama therapy group. In doing so, I reviewed the importance of conflict within the encounter. I have learned that the goal of all therapy, and especially drama therapy, “is neither to succumb nor pretend, but to accept and transcend” (Johnson, 1991, p. 286). It is within this transfiguration that the learning takes place. It is the creative exploration of the soul that ensues when words simply cannot speak.
References
Butler, J.D. (2012). Playing with madness: developmental transformations and the treatment of schizophrenia. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 39, 87-94.
Jennings, S., Cattanach, A., Mitchell, S., Chesner, A., & Meldrum, B. (1993). The handbook of dramatherapy. London: Taylor & Francis, LTD.
Jennings, S. (1992). Dramatherapy with families, groups, and individuals: waiting in the wings. London: Taylor & Francis, LTD.
Johnson, D.R., (1991). The theory and technique of transformations in drama therapy. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 18, 285-300.
Reynolds, A. (2011). Developmental transformations: improvisational drama therapy with children in acute inpatient psychiatry. Social Work with Groups, 34:3-4, 296-309.
Yalom, I.D., & Leszcz, M. (2005). The theory and practice of group psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.