What is Dramatherapy?
Dramatherapy offers a safe space in which the client can play, improvise, create and fully explore their imaginative and real worlds. What emerges in this space can be a rich resource to bring back into everyday life and can have the potential to bring new insights and self-awareness to the individual. Dramatherapy does not necessarily involve any drama, though the drama of life can be explored expressively and creatively.
‘Dramatherapy has as its main forms the intentional use of the healing aspects of drama and therapy within the therapeutic process. It is a method of working and playing which uses action methods to facilitate creativity, imagination, insight and growth.’ British Association of Dramatherapists
‘…a unique form of psychotherapy in which creativity, play, movement, voice, storytelling, dramatisation, and the performance arts have a central position within the therapeutic relationship.’ The Health & Care Professions Council
'(Dramatherapy) values the possibilities of the unadorned encounter between a therapist and a client in the play space. Here, the world of imagination with all its contradictions and mysteries can be revealed through the embodied play of two free consciousnesses.' David Read Johnson, PhD, RDT/BCT Director, The Institutes for the Arts in Psychotherapy
'Unlike talk therapy, drama therapy gets there really fast. Role-playing -acting out issues and problems - is more effective than talking.'
Robert Landy, PhD, RDT/BCT Director Drama Therapy Program, New York University
Dramatherapy can help you to:
As a practice, dramatherapy aims to do the following:
Dramatherapy may be used as a treatment for the following: