Stories That Need to be Told:Using Playback Theatre as a Way to Explore Loss and Grief and Build Resilience (original) (raw)

Performative retelling: Healing community stories of loss through Playback Theatre

Death Studies, 2018

Restorative retelling (RR) is an evidence-based procedure for facilitating adaptation following traumatic bereavement. In this paper, we introduce performative retelling (PR), a variation on RR, which fosters healing from personal losses and portrays personal reactions to collective tragedy. We describe our collaboration with an ex-offender reentry program, the Memphis Police Department, and Playback Theatre to use improvisational community theatre to bridge the gap between law enforcement and the citizens they serve. We review program outcomes to-date and illustrate its impact using participant stories. We argue that training police and citizens in PR can potentially transform broken narratives of police-community relations.

Songs and storytelling – a therapeutic theatre-making process as a tool to heal the wounds of the past

2017

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts (Drama Therapy), 2017The main intention of this paper is to share my experiences and discoveries explored through a theatre-making qualitative research process. In this manner, I created and directed my own autobiographical play as a means of revisiting and working through specific traumatic events in my past. The aim is to share how this helped heal the wounds of the past. In this paper, I have included my personal encounters, my observations and my reflections how Therapeutic Theatre and theatre-making methodologies were used in creating, in rehearsing and in the performance of the play to facilitate the healing of my traumatic past. The play, entitled Home Is Where Pap En Vleis Is, deals with a specific event believed to be the source of the trauma I have been dealing with. I used the play as a vehicle t...

The Presence of Grief: Research-Based Art and Arts-Based Research on Grief

Qualitative Inquiry, 2018

The authors involved in the creation of this text collaborate on a research project called The Culture of Grief, which explores the current conditions and implications of grief. The authors mostly employ conventional forms of qualitative inquiry, but the present text represents an attempt to reach a level of understanding not easily obtained through conventional methods. The group of authors participated as members of the audience in an avant-garde theatrical performance about grief, created by a group called CoreAct. The artists of CoreAct create their art through systematic research, in this case on grief, and we as researchers decided to study both the development of the play and its performance, and to report our impressions in fragments in a way that hopefully represents the nature of grief as an experienced phenomenon. We use Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s concept of presence to look for understanding beyond meaning in grief and its theatrical enactment.

Therapeutic creativity and the lived experience of grief in the collaborative fiction film Lost Property

Research for All

This collaborative project aimed to represent the embodied experience of grief in a fiction film by drawing on research, and on the personal and professional experience of all involved: academics; an artist; bereavement therapists and counsellors; and professional actors, cinematographers, sound engineers and other film crew. By representing grief in a more phenomenologically minded manner, the project sought to capture the lived experience of loss on screen while contributing meaningfully to the discourse on practice-as-research. Hay, Dawson and Rosling used a collaborative fiction film and participatory action research to investigate whether storying loss, and representing it through narrative, images and embodied movement, is therapeutic. Participatory action research was beneficial in facilitating changes in the co-researchers’ thinking, feeling and practice, and in enabling participants to inhabit multiple roles in a manner that expanded their disciplinary boundaries. However, ...

Playback Theatre: An Investigation Into Applied Theatre and Communities of Meaning, with Specific Reference to Education and Health

This thesis explores Playback Theatre (PBT) as a site for learning and healing, with meaning-making as the linking dynamic. This is done through: 1. the researcher’s own meaning-making of a performance; 2. a model locating PBT at the nexus of Narrative, Performance, Health and Education. 3. an analytical heuristic where the propositions implicit in the literature were made explicit, and used to search for empirical evidence using the lived experience of its participants; and, 4. the development of an emergent theory of PBT that was informed by this evidence. The research questions are in two categories— Empirical and Theoretical. The empirical questions asked about the lived experience of PBT, and the associated process of meaning-making. These questions were then re-ordered and expanded in light of the data, to include: what is inherent in the form that might make it rich with potential for learning-healing, processes used to work towards this potential, and impacts these may have on the social-emotional lives of participants. The empirical research covered one five month and one six month period. It involved interviewing 47 participants from nine performances and videoing rehearsals and a public performance. The investigation is post-positivistic and broadly humanistic using mixed methods: Phenomenology, Phenomenography and Grounded Theory. The theoretical propositions are established through review of literature, and NUD*IST (4) used to examine these in light of the interview data. As the propositions were supported by empirical evidence, they were used to construct an emergent theory of PBT. At the heart of this theory is a process of meaning-making. It asserts “telling”, “witnessing”, and “modelling” as essential elements of PBT and these activate individual and group learning that gives rise to new meanings. This can lead to emotional healing. The theory also asserts that healing increases potential for additional learning to occur because it makes telling, witnessing and modelling more salient. It is finally argued that the efficacy of PBT as a vehicle for meaning-making and, hence, learning-healing, reflects the particular social-aesthetic context of PBT. Suggestions are made regarding contributions that PBT can make to Education, and questions posed for future research.

The application of African mourning rituals within the Drama therapy space in order to support clients responses to loss

Topic: The application of African mourning rituals within the Drama therapy space in order to support responses to loss. PLAIGIARISM DECLARATION I hereby, declare that this essay serves as evidence of my own work. Any thoughts I have borrowed, I have properly quoted and referenced. Signed: Date: 22 January 2019 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS  To my Heavenly Father, for the grace and favour that has guided me during my journey of becoming a trainee therapist. Hallelujah!  To my son, Loyiso Jerome Mqwathi, your support, understanding and faith in me kept me going even when every part of me wanted to give up. Even though you are a child, your innocence and faith in me reminded me of my own child-like faith and of my childhood dreams.  To my late parents, Joe Jabulani Mqwathi and Dolly Sibongile Mqwathi strangely your deaths have inspired and propelled me and somehow I feel like you are celebrating with me.  To my best friend, Limpho Kou I am forever grateful for your beautiful friendship and your patience with the woman I am becoming. Sometimes you gave me tough love just to remind me of who I am, thank you!  To my spiritual parents, Dr Soji Soogun and Mama Victoria Soogun you have both modelled the love of God for me. Your support and prayers kept me sane and going. Ese!  To my two sisters, Mosa and Ntombizodwa and angels posing as friends thank for your support, prayers and for encouraging me to hold on to this better sweet journey of becoming. Ndiayabulela!  To my drama therapy classmates of 2016, being with you felt like being in a labour ward with a group of other pregnant women constantly pushing, crying and of course indulging in delicacies in the form of words (theory) just to make sure that we finally

Grief and loss; living with the presence of absence. A practice based study of personal grief narratives and participatory projects

2017

The thesis develops work started on the MA in Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking. It addresses the question - Can personal grief narratives explored through contemporary arts practice,auto-ethnographic writing, and the participatory performative act of making and being in specific places result in access into, the potentially, restorative space of mourning; moving between what continues to exist and what is missing in the physical world? This troubles at the Western societal idea of getting over grief and presents an alternative model of walking with and alongside loss as well as providing opportunities for conversations and ‘metalogues’, following Bateson (1972). An investigation follows, through a phenonmenological methodology of repetition, into the functions of articulating loss and absence through stories in exploring personal grief narratives, through contemporary arts practice and the participatory creative enacting of rituals in specific places which involve the interweaving of ...

Narrating & Living with Loss: Towards an Ethnography of Grief

AUC Knowledge Fountain, 2023

Through this paper, I seek to approach grief through how it is lived, the nexus between loss, and the sought-for physical abstractions through memory, objects, and materials to live with/despite such a loss. This paper is a phenomenological and ethnographic research project on the curatory rituals and practices that individuals employ in keeping lost loved ones alive in their everyday. I explore grief through a multidisciplinary and multimodal conceptualization rather than simply through cultural and social practices such as burial and mortuary rituals. The research follows the grief narratives of different individuals in Egypt in inquiring about the objects, memories, practices, rituals, and the mnemonic effect embedded within these varying elements. The research scopes grief and living with loss through psychology and psychoanalysis but, most significantly, ethnography and anthropology. Through this phenomenological approach, I analyze the relevant anthropological theories to these narratives through allusion to time, temporality, affect, the state and bureaucracies, memory, and objects. My central questions are: what is symbolically immortal for different individuals in coping with the loss of their loved ones? How is memory constituted, kept, narrated, and concealed to honor such losses, and what are the varying roles that objects and materials play in the networks of relations surrounding deaths? As I draw closer to my conclusion, I attempt to answer, “What is constitutive of loss when you lose everything with it?” I find that the most generative way to study grief is through a phenomenological approach to centralize each person’s experience and the meticulous ways of living with loss, as connoted by those who have lived and understood it. Thus, for me, experiences and narratives of loss have become at the heart of studying ‘grief.’ The materiality and cosmological manifestations of such loss contend with one another; ultimately, reliance on the unique path for living with loss is as unique as a fingerprint. Each person narrates their grief differently and, by extension, lives through it differently. This project serves to centralize people’s experiences and narratives in navigating their lives with loss, how love is reprimanded from such loss and restructured or imbued in different ways. As an ethnographer and observer of grief, I find that nothing should be conclusive to such grief. At the heart of this struggle, we must always find ways outside of closed narratives and closed spaces to invite and sit and observe our grief, honor our losses, and live life despite and because of these losses. My personal losses and grievances have propelled me to write, research, and approach this topic. My autoethnography is interwoven through and with the multiple narratives that I include. I mainly include my story through my fieldnotes, Anthropoetry, and poesis. I honestly and wholeheartedly cannot concur that I present a profound understanding or analysis of grief and believe it is contrary to my inclination to write this to say that one can do so. I wrote this to speak one truth to existence: narratives comprise these pains and can hold our understanding of anything within this world. Personal narratives, whether mine or that of the group of lovely individuals who have been a part of this process, are at the forefront of my paper. It is nothing without them, and everything it is, is because of them.