In(the)Out

winter, 2010

An exploration of ‘space’ in drama therapy, using Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” as a spring board.

To be published in “The British Association of Dramatherapists,” Journal.

Tempestual Therapy:

A Shakespearean Lesson In The School Of Therapy, On The Topography Of The Dramatic Arts.

Never have I studied The Tempest before: never have I scaled its sliding plot; never have I analyzed the roles of Caliban, Ariel or Prospero; nor have I ever rehearsed the order of its dee-dumms for more than a few minutes at a time.  And even now, in my freshman year at New York University, with the intent of pursuing a degree in medicine, I seemed to have dodged the Renaissance just fine.

Why, then, in my spring semester, did the ghost of Shakespeare come back to haunt me?  I was innocently taking a creative arts therapy course, studying drama therapy, when it appeared: Act I, scene ii, of The Tempest.  We were asked to write a paper, relating The Tempest to some factor of drama therapy worked on in class.  My previous knowledge? A few readings on the use of drama as therapy, as well as exercises led by my professor, Maria Hodermarska, and British guest drama therapist, Anna Seymour.  My literary understanding of the play?  Nonexistent.  My only clue? A few key phrases in the piece (in which, I was pretty sure, Prospero and Miranda bully Caliban on his own land), an ambiguous relation to the space of ‘the island’ in the scene, and—the bottom line—my own creativity.

I did recall, however, Anna Seymour, having our class play the simple game of ‘Follow My Leader’.  It was the actor’s most trivial game of pretend.  There was one appointed leader, after whom the others would mimic, following the chosen one throughout an imagined playspace.  Simple enough.  Yet being in a creative therapy class after all, I was doubtful: the only “therapeutic” license I saw in this activity was perhaps a Freudian slip into the past, invoking only childhood memories of boredom and frivolous games on rainy weekends.  Initially, I saw in this exercise not a trace of the ‘space,’ ‘mirroring (or doubling)’ ‘distance,” “projection,” “metaphor,” or dynamic “(counter)role” concepts which were the buzzwords of our assigned reading the night before.  Upon the conclusion of the game however, I realized that I was wrong.

After only a brief warm-up, we were told to play: to ‘Follow My Leader’ on ‘an island’.  That was our script.  This was new to me.  The ‘followers’ were now at the mercy of the leader’s mind, silent thoughts and visions.  Where was the theatrical “structure” the readings made me expect (Landy 102)?  How could I play my partif I had no idea where I was going, or what that part even was? 

Furthermore, today’s routine warm-up was supposed to increase a therapeutic sense of ‘trust’ and ‘safety in revealing aspects of [the self]’ (Landy 100).  But today was different.  Perhaps my studies and grown-up insecurities were too overpowering: I was finding it difficult to let go.  After all, who was to say we would be safe on the leader’s little ‘island of adventure’?  There was drama in this exercise for sure, but therapy?  In that, I was more skeptical. 

But, as my academics reminded me, in drama therapy, there exists a “separation between the I and the me, the part that thinks or acts, and the part that is thought about or acted upon” (Landy 90).  And right now, me, myself and I could not have been more uniform.  So I shut my mouth and doubting mind, and let the severance begin. 

And I perceived it to be just as psychodramatist Levy Moreno had said: “change [occurs] most clearly through dramatic enactment” (Landy 91). 

In no time at all, I found myself immersed in a world of both peril and paradise.  With only a few hand gestures as clues, we were led through jungles and over mountain peaks. Together, we became secret agents, fording rivers and ducking between bridges.  I could feel the wind and smell the ocean breeze.  And yet I was still there, fully functioning in the vibrant domain, while the me was wholly committed to the completion of our leader’s vision: our mission yet unaccomplished. 

It was upon the conclusion of our cathartic ‘play’, that I truly understood the therapeutic powers of Seymour’s dramatic ‘metaphor,’ of the “express[ive]” character of role play (Landy 94).  It was surreal; as far as all of me was concerned, even while in the leader’s island, a setting of her own imagination, I felt like I still had a part to play, like my I still resonated.

But how could this be?  As a performer and student I do agree with the idea that ‘human beings take on and play roles as a natural means of expression,’ but this didn’t feel sufficient (Landy 96).  I had just experienced was more a highlight in my textbook.  What I felt was a wholly unreal reality: part of me—dependent upon and within me—but totally not of my fashion—independent and without me.

Perhaps, the paradox could be explained by the theatrical character of the game:  “[A] major part of the actor’s job is to find a way to live truthfully under the imaginary circumstances of the play…[even when things are] not within his control” (Bruder 6).  This ‘uncontrollable’ spontaneity of a dramatic “beat change,” can be paralleled to the “separation between…thought…[and] action” natural in the remedial imagination (Bruder 6, 87; Landy 90, 2005).  Thus, a catharsis is manifested in theatre and healing.  And so, though the leader spoke not a word, the “experiment[ation] between the difference between pretend and reality [latent in the unstructured ‘Follow My Leader’],” allowed me to map out the restrictions and limitations of myself and the other.  And in that, I found therapy.

In truth, if ‘drama and theatre…are at the basis of how we perceive the world we live in and how we communicate our experience to others,’ (Landy 92) and ‘fictional frames’ are used in therapy to set ‘safe boundaries [in order to be able to] proceed to the next, more challenging roles in play’, then the pretend setting of “Follow My Leader” allowed for just that kind of growth (Landy 109).  Its one-word setting (an island) unattached the space from the workings of only the leader’s mind.  It gave distance and let others contribute, too.  By the freeform impulsiveness of play and the creative imagination, I was able to inject and take away pieces of that open world, safely and without repercussion.  The ‘island’ was a metaphor: flexible and malleable.  Because of the ‘projective’ ability of the imagination, both the ‘leader’ and the ‘follower’ could be changed and developed and a result. 

I finally understood the ‘playspace.’  If only Shakespeare could see me now!  Just as drama therapy’s ‘projective nature…helps clients move into fictional roles within the playspace in order to provide a measure of distance from everyday reality,’ and in there, find actualization (Landy 107); “serv[ice to the] theatre,” too, provides actors with “the greatest exhilaration it is possible to know,’ and a comparable ‘truth of the moment’ (Mamet xi; Bruder 40).  Thus The Tempest and my practices in drama therapy were unfoiled: both the play and ‘Follow My Leader’ revolved around setting.  From a romantic perspective, the ‘isle,’ ‘the space,’ of The Tempest was a projective map of the psyches of its inhabitants and those that shared in its existence, its ‘followers’ (characters in the scene such as Prospero, Ariel, Caliban, and Miranda) (II, i, l. 339, 279).  This is just like the leader’s creative place and our givings to it and takings from it.  Moreover, the characters of the play show how the ‘[play]space’s’ flexibility agrees with the formation of very unique and personal connections, malleable and ever changing as a result.  For instance, Caliban retains an antique, and perhaps false, security that ‘ this island’s mine [his], by Sycorax my [his] mother,’ (II, i, l. 333).  But earlier interjections by Prospero and Miranda had changed this sense of tenure, leaving Caliban in a reality of restriction, not free to private his own mother’s land.  In fact, the truth is Caliban is only left a slave on ‘[that] hard rock,’ the geography of his mind’s past (II, i, l. 310, 345). Thus, the island is not more ‘his’ than the game’s leader was hers, ours or mine.

Although Caliban’s reality is not the Art of Mysticism and Darkness literally alluded to, it is more relative to the power latent in the Art of Creativity: the power in pretend, in personal imagination and ownership, and in the ever fluctuating relation between the “contain[er]” and the “contained” (Landy 113, 111).  ‘Following My Leader’ may have caused subjection and ownership on Shakespeare’s stage, but my class’s trustworthy, creative ‘space,’ contained were not ‘followers’, but individual histories (Landy 101).  On the therapeutic island, we were subjects to a distant and secure creative unconscious, only influenced by the power of the greater, developmental process.

And so, as after any turning point, the action fell: like the actor into a bow, like the thunderous applause at the Globe.  Although I had never before studied The Tempest, I still experienced a cathartic me, a creative I that could not be confused by either poetic or therapeutic jargon.  I became a ‘Caliban’ to the power of the creative, a ‘follower’ to a collective vision, and ‘leader’ to my own direction—these separate, rambunctious roles together actualizing my one and whole part to play.

“…Thou best know’st

            What torment I did find thee in…

…it was a torment

            To lay upon the damn’d…

            …[but] it was mine Art,

            When I arriv’d and heard thee, that made gape

            The pine, and let thee out.”

— Prospero, The Tempest (II, i, l. 285-293)

Bruder, Melissa, Lee M. Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previto, and Scott Zigler (1986)  A Practical Handbook For The Actor.  New York: Vintage Books.

Landy, Robert J.(2005) ‘Drama Therapy and Psychodrama.’ in Expressive Therapies. Ed. Cathy A. Malchiodi. New York: The Guildford Press.

Mamet, David (1986) pp. ix to xi. in Bruder, Melissa, Lee M. Cohn, Madeleine Olnek, Nathaniel Pollack, Robert Previto, and Scott Zigler.  A Practical Handbook For The Actor.  New York: Vintage Books.

Shakespeare, William.  “The Tempest”.  Act I, sc. ii. l. 250-377.

—-Yasmin Ogale, 2009