alisonboston.com

I’ve just done a three day workshop with River Chandler of Theater Works. River is a social worker cum theater artist who has picked up on the power of Augusta Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed as adapted by David Diamond.

I first got interested in using theater in this way when I was studying with Brenda Anderson at Red Deer Community College in 1976-77. One of my electives was creative dramatics, and in the context of that course, Brenda showed us a film about how creative drama had been used to produce remarkable results with autistic children.

I next encountered this kind of therapeutic use of theater and drama when I was living in Ottawa in the 1980’s. There I met it in the form of Playback Theater - both in Ottawa, and during a visit to Toronto - where I participated as a ‘drop-in’ in workshop that was being facilitated by Cheryl Cashman, who was one of my profs at Ottawa U. Then in the early 1990’s I did a Theater of the Oppressed workshop here in Victoria with Lina deGuevara.

Shortly after that, I facilitated some Playback Theater workshops with athletes to help them get in touch in with intense emotions they experienced during competition. My own training and experience as a triathlete, competetive masters swimmer and runner, had me thinking very deeply about the relationship between actor training and athlete training, and I was thinking about doing an interdisciplinary masters in kinesiology and creative drama/drama therapy. For various reasons, I chose not to pursue those studies, yet the application of theater for therapeutic purposes keeps biting me.

While living in Hungary, I heard about a drama workshop being conducted as part of the European Treatment Centres for Addiction annual conference, and I signed myself up for that. The participants were made up of treatment counsellors, psychologists, chronic psychiatric patients suffering from mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bi-polar discorder, as well as recovering addicts and alcoholics. Other than the workshop facilitators, I was the only ‘theater’ person there.

This latest workshop facilitated by River Chandler was used to explore issues related to living and working on poverty. I hesitated about doing the workshop, because I wasn’t crazy about spending my weekend analyzing such a depressing topic. But I’m glad I did the workshop, because I was constantly awed by the metaphors that could be drawn, and how effective the games were to stimulate discussion among the participants. A play will be created by five of the participants this week and presented next week at the Corporate Social Responsibility Conference being held by Victoria’s Community Council. I’m interested to see that and see the results.

I’m also helping out with my mother’s seniors theater group Target and find myself provoked by the possibilities of their group as well.

As a teacher of English as a foreign language, I’ve wanted to use drama and tried to get groups going in Hungary - which was maybe not the most open culture in which to attempt that kind of progressive technique. River told me someone at U.Vic is doing an interdisciplinary masters in applied theater and applied linguistics, and I’ve seen it used by one language school here in Victoria, as well as a school in Spain.

Headlines Theater offers intensive training workshops and there are some coming up in August. After doing the workshop in Hungary with Sandor, I had started to think about going to France to train with Sandor’s mentor. Now I see I can do a workshop here, and I think I might just do that - even though it does change my intended agenda for August!