Drama Therapy Techniques

Drama therapy, with roots in the creative process, deals with hypothetical situations and fantasy and uses primarily projective techniques.  By projecting feelings, attitudes and issues through masks, puppetry, life size dolls, objects, cartoons, video, art and fabrics, participants invite their creativity to come forth while achieving distance from feeling vulnerable and exposed.  This distance creates a safe, nurturing place where individuals trust and begin to express their spontaneity in thoughts, feelings and ideas.  A safe environment and empathetic drama therapist, invite the participants to grow, explore issues, and learn more about themselves.

Art shows participants responses to their created products as reflections of an individual's development, abilities, personality, interests, concerns and conflicts.  Art offers a way of reconciling emotional conflicts, fostering self-awareness, developing social skills, managing behavior, solving problems, reducing anxiety, aiding reality orientation and increasing self esteem.  Art may be used in any part of the drama therapy session, as a warm-up, main activity, or closure

Cartooning distances the participant from the material and provides a creative tool for activating the imagination.  In working with cartooning, the drama therapist uses existing cartoon characters, strips or single frames and encourages participants to create their own into significant fantasy or life script scenes.

Various colors, textures and shapes of fabric and scarves assist the participant in establishing roles, creating a scene, showing a conflict and expressing emotions. The sensory aspects of fabrics (i.e. rough, silky, soft, nubby) invite  the participant to express and explore feelings.

Life size dolls open up a whole creative world of possibilities. Dolls may be cast as family members, significant others, narrator, teacher, child and other important characters in stories yet to come.  A life size doll can also represent  an externalized problem (i.e. anger) or that inner voice that comes forth in a discovery of personal agency or an auxiliary character in the retelling of a personal history.

Through using a mask, the participant learns more about himself or herself, and reveals feelings, emotions and perceptions previously not expressed.  The participant experiences the world with a new freedom and creativity.  The mask transforms the person into a persona.  The mask as persona helps the individual explore aspects of the self and functions as a double of the person.

Objects open up possibilities for roles, stories, conflicts and significant moments to come forth.  These objects may be placed in sand, on a flat surface or structure of different levels or in an arrangement of fabrics. Participants show a preferred scene, present world, preferred world, future scene or special place.  Objects provide a range of possibilities to assist persons to take on roles and tells stories while working in a safe environment.

Puppets engage all age groups. They introduce values and problem-solving skills, spark new ideas, establish communication, and ease emotional problems.  Simply stated, puppets promote communication and expression of feelings.  The puppet distances the participant and allows hidden emotions and feelings to be expressed.  A puppet invites the creative release of energies and expressive abilities. Puppets function as a projective device allowing the participant to reveal hidden emotions and conflicts.

The use of video in drama therapy has achieved a tremendous surge of interest.  Research shows that video "confrontation" helps participants to see how others see them as well as evaluate the effect of their behavior on others.  Research also shows that participants come to deeper insights about themselves sooner.  In the hands of a trained drama therapist, video and drama interventions serve to help a person realize goals of behavior change, insight, catharsis and enhanced self esteem.

Rituals provide a way to concretize changes (i.e. new life direction), clarify important values, make transitions, signify important decisions and make public these important landmarks.

Developing stories and/or using meaningful written stories helps persons activate their creative energies as well as examine alternative solutions to problems. Stories shape persons lives and offer a sense of coherence, continuity and purpose.  We grow as persons as we live through and perform our stories. Acting out a story assists the participant to understand what is happening from the prospective of the role which invites sensitivity and understanding.

Creating a autobiographical script offers participants an opportunity for integration and synthesis of important life experiences.  It provides a significant advantage for review and documentation of a therapeutic and self-evolving process and allows the opportunity to break out of old patterns and explore new ones. The life script presentation may be centered in ritual, dance or multi media/puppets,  and represent any of the following dramatic forms: Greek theatre, Brecht, stand up comedy, living newspaper, ritual, mime vignette or any other creative theatrical style.

Any form of drama (i.e. story, life script, sculpture, scene) explored from a narrative perspective which allows a person to change a relationship to a problem by exploring alternative directions and unique outcomes (times when persons manage not to be controlled by their problems).  Drama therapy and narrative processes open space for alternative meanings and possibilities.  The gains in awareness and self knowledge come through experiencing oneself in an empowering way against the problem.

A drama therapy techniques which separates the person from the problem and taking a more empowering stance. Externalization fees persons from problem-saturated fixed descriptions of their lives and offers other choices.  Externalizing invites persons to identify and develop a new relationship with the problem and in the process create new unique re-descriptions of themselves and their relationships which provide ingredients for new life scenarios.

Games combine analytical thinking about problems with emotional expressive activity providing a dynamic model for individual and group work  The game moves a group gently into action and breaks down group inhibitions allowing individuals to trust and feel comfortable.  The game structure combined with drama therapy allows a person to: develop interaction and sense of group play, create trust and bond in a group, provide a safe place to experiment, experience spontaneity, encourage emotional growth, establish more comfortable feelings, safely express thoughts and feelings, develop problem solving skills, learn experientially, focus attention, provide a structure for therapy goals to be met and gain insight.

Phototherapy uses photography or photographic materials under the guidance of a trained therapist, to reduce or relieve painful psychological symptoms and to facilitate psychological growth and therapeutic change.  In integrating phototherapy and drama therapy, the drama therapist aims to accomplish the following goals : (1) evocation of emotional states; (2) elicitation of verbal response or confrontation; (3) modeling and or mastery of a skill; (4) facilitation of socialization and (5) creativity and expression.