Nathan Curry
Therapeutic Theatre
Theatre has the power to reflect experiences back to us. It holds up a mirror to life. But not everyone’s reflections are given equal space.
Over the past eight years Tangled Feet have developed a model of therapeutic theatre where we work with a targeted group of young people to co-create a piece of theatre that explores their lived experience and shares it with a wider audience. The act of making the show has outcomes for both the participants and the creative team that align with therapeutic processes and the creation and touring of the show helps to shine a light on an unseen story.
Tangled Feet have made a number of therapeutic theatre pieces – working with young carers to create Need A Little Help (the story of a child looking after her unwell Dad) and Butterflies, working with children who suffer anxiety (to tell the story of anxiety as a normal part of growing up). Between 2019-2023 Tangled Feet collaborated with Rowan Tree Dramatherapy and children who live in foster homes to co-create Belongings.
The Process of Creation
The offer to our Co-Creators: “Come and help make a piece of theatre that will be inspired by your lived experience. The show will be performed by a professional cast and created by a professional team but your ideas will be the centre of it.”
Therapeutic Theatre needs a safe space in which to exist. All the young people we worked with (aged between 11-17) had been through a process of Dramatherapy with Rowan Tree and were in place to explore their lived experience further through discussion, games and metaphor. Our target audience was 7-11 year olds and we recruited older children to be the co-creators to allow distancing and objectivity to exist.
We worked slowly (partly due to Covid lockdowns) and had regular workshops where we’d share ideas, scenes and explore theatrical metaphor together. Themes emerged quickly (and which were going to be helpful for the narrative of our story to connect with all children regardless of their backgrounds). These themes were identity, siblings, resilience through play and the power of the past/future. The Dramatherapists at Rowan Tree were able to check in and check out with the participants as we worked. Play was at the centre of how we worked and it is central to the performance style of Belongings…play as a safe way of exploring difficult experiences, play as a starting point, play as a way of bridging the gap between performers and spectators, and play to bring people together.
The workshops created a feedback loop: Exploration with Co-Creators to inform research and development, to create scenes that could be shared back with the Co-Creators. Their feedback on the scenes was incorporated into the rehearsal process to create more ideas to be shared back again. The feedback loop created greater responsibility and authenticity.
The Performance and tour
The show uses a series of metaphors (that the Co-Creators helped create) to explore their experiences. This is a central principle of dramatherapeutic practice, which uses metaphor as a way of exploring difficult experiences at a safe distance. These metaphors included shadows, mirrors, clothes, parachutes. The dynamic potential of the objects and the dynamic potential of materials became an offer to the creative team, in the same way that if you offer something into a dramatherapy session it becomes a tool to reflect a different part of your experience rather than it being the object itself.
The effect on the Co-Creators was huge:
“I wanted (the audience) to know it can happen to anyone and you’re not alone when it happens…It can be anyone, all over the country.” Co-Creator
“I just wanted people to get the feelings that the characters feel and understand that that’s the feelings we feel”. Co-Creator
Towards the end of the performance the young audience are offered a chance to step into the performance space and experience the metaphors and atmosphere of the play. This is a key idea in our brand of Therapeutic Theatre -the audience step into the world they’ve just witnessed and inhabit it. It becomes a dialogue; as opposed to being a passive spectator you become an active engager.
Belongings tours the UK (theatres and schools) from Feb-June 2024. A Resource Pack accompanies all performances. You can read more about the process of creation including interviews with the creators in this long form article by Journalist Catherine Love.
Author
Nathan Curry is the Co-Artistic Director of Tangled Feet theatre company based in Luton, UK. They create original theatre across a variety of platforms that explore the tensions in people’s lives and the world around them.
