Special Needs – Drama Therapy Central

June 29, 2017June 30, 2017

Drama therapy program benefits Manhattan community, K-State students

Center for Engagement and Community Development

Engagement E-News October 2007

by Kendall Lange

Theatrical arts and drama are often closely linked with the Big Apple, but K-State Professor Sally Bailey has brought the benefits of drama to the Little Apple. Bailey’s strong theatrical background made her the perfect pick to carry on the drama therapy program started at K-State by Dr. Norman Fedder in the 1980s.

Drama therapy engages K-State students and includes an outreach program to Manhattan area residents. “The best way to learn how to be a drama therapist is through hands-on experience,” Bailey said. “It doesn’t work just to read about it because it involves people skills within an embodied experience.”

The drama therapy program and K-State drama therapy students are working on several ongoing projects. Barrier-Free Theatre, done in partnership with the City of Manhattan Parks and Recreation and the Manhattan Arts Center, offers adolescents and adults with disabilities the chance to create an original play and perform it each April at the Manhattan Arts Center.

In June, Bailey began a drama group at Meadowlark Hills Retirement Community. A group of 12 adults between the ages of 75-95 meet each week to improvise and work on different projects. During the summer, the group hosted an original improvisational mystery dinner theatre play. “This fall, a number of drama therapy students have joined us at Meadowlark Hills,” said Bailey. “There’s a wonderful give and take as K-State students teach them about drama and the residents teach the students about life and growing older.”

Other projects include drama camp for adolescents with special needs during the summer and various after-school projects with children at risk. Bailey believes that drama therapy has many positive effects on participants including increased self-awareness, communication skills, self-confidence, discipline and understanding of oneself and others. These benefits are part of Bailey’s vision for the drama therapy program at K-State. “When students see how powerful drama therapy is and how much it positively affects peoples’ lives, they develop the drive and the vision to take drama therapy other places,” Bailey said.

February 6, 2017June 30, 2017

Barrier-Free Theater book published

Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2010

DRAMA THERAPIST’S NEW BOOK PROMOTES BARRIER-FREE THEATER

MANHATTAN — Sally Bailey, associate professor and director of the drama therapy program at Kansas State University, recently had her third book, “Barrier-Free Theatre,” published by Idyll Arbor. In the book Bailey shares her ideas, tips and anecdotes about making theater accessible to children and adults with disabilities. “If you do theater, but know nothing about disabilities, you’ll learn about them,” Bailey said. “If you know about disabilities, but not about how to facilitate drama, you’ll learn about that. I wanted to give all the building blocks so that people can take what they need. If you have no building blocks, with this book you have a whole kit.”

Bailey was first exposed to drama therapy and learned about accommodating people with disabilities when she worked for various arts programs in Washington, D.C. After becoming a registered drama therapist, she used her skills while working with recovering drug addicts at the rehabilitation facility Second Genesis, and with people with disabilities at Imagination Stage, a nonprofit arts center. She moved to Manhattan to head up K-State’s drama therapy master’s program in 1999. She also is the director of the Manhattan Parks and Recreation’s barrier-free theater. “By chance, one of the families whose children I had worked with in the D.C. area had moved to Manhattan and had talked the parks and rec department into creating a barrier-free program,” Bailey said. “They believed it was so important that every town should have one.”

Bailey’s new book is nearly a decade in the making. She said publishers could not understand who the audience was, but she knows that since 20 percent of people have some kind of disability, the audience is definitely there. “Drama can really level the playing field and allow many different people to work together,” Bailey said. “In the theater all people can express themselves and be creative as equals. Drama can be a part of more people’s lives if directors and teachers know how to include everyone.”

February 6, 2017June 29, 2017

Ideas for Inclusive Playwriting

Think in terms of the strengths and talents of your actors – what do they do best?

INCORPORATE THEIR STRENGTHS AND INTERESTS INTO THE SCRIPT.

Think of ways to SIDE-STEP the WEAKNESSES of your actors.

You can do this by not giving actors action or lines that you know would be difficult for them.
Incorporate other actors into the scene who can help them (see ideas below).

CAST the play before you begin to write so you can pair up people who can help each other in different ways during the course of the play.

INCORPORATE SPECIAL TALENTS:
Playing an instrument,
Dancing,
Singing,
Pantomime,
Juggling,
Magic Tricks,
Telling jokes,
Howling like a werewolf,
Puppetry,
Pratfalls, etc.

INCORPORATE wheelchairs and other devices into the play so there is a reason for the devices to be onstage:
Thrones,
Carriages,
Royal litters,
Haywagons,
Ambulances,
Trucks,
Cabs, etc.

• On the other hand, you don’t HAVE to have a rationale or excuse for a character to be in a wheelchair or to have another obvious disability – you can have that just be part of that character that is not even remarked upon in the play.

• Don’t let a device or a disability stop a character from doing what he or she needs to do in the play. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

IF A LINE IS DIFFICULT TO SAY, rewrite it:

Use different words
Change the order of the phrases
Shorten the line

USING MEMORIZATION STRENGTHS:

• Use the natural speaking rhythms, phrasing, and vocabulary of your actors, especially if the script is based on their improvisations. If the lines are already in their words, speech, and thought patterns, they will be easier for actors to speak and remember.

• If you have an actor who is a good memorizer, have him or her ask questions in a scene to an actor who is not as good at memorization. It is easier to remember the answer to a question (especially since you know the answer from the script) than it is to remember a question.

• However, don’t have characters answer just “yes” or “no,” as they may become confused about which answer to say. Have answers be with specific Who, What, Where, and When information that relates clearly to the story and which can be more easily remembered.

• An actor who is a good memorizer can also handle the part of someone in authority, who gives orders.

• If an actor has a joke – make sure he/she understands the humor/meaning behind it, or he won’t be able to remember it.

• Incorporate reminders for actions and lines into the dialogue of actors who can memorize – make sure those reminders are phrased in positive terms. An actor with a cognitive disability will do what he or she is told to do, but can become confused if the hint is phrased in a negative way (For example, if you want an actor to go into a cave, a hint from another actor like, “Don’t go in there!” probably will be taken as a direction to not go in!).

If a line is phrased indirectly (“I wonder where we should go next?”) the actor being cued won’t be helped…because there is no hint in the line.

• Use a live or recorded narrator to structure the scene.

• Use music and/or sound effects to remind characters about entrances or exits or cue changes in the action within a scene.

• Incorporate video or film into your play. These scenes won’t have to be memorized. And they can be filmed as many times as you need in rehearsal until they are just right.

SIDESTEPPING problems with MEMORIZATION:

• A character like a TV interviewer, talk show host, doctor, or detective can have a clipboard of notes that can be referred to for the questions they might have to ask other characters. It looks realistic to incorporate the lines written on those props.

• Create groups of characters who work together onstage with at least one actor involved who has a good sense of direction and memorization. Everyone else can follow along and do their appropriate lines and actions if they have someone reliable to follow.

• In rehearsals encourage actors to improvise if they forget a line and to help fellow actors remember lines through asking them appropriate questions in character. Let them practice so they will be ready if it happens in performance.

SIDESTEPPING problems with actors who are NOT CLEAR SPEAKERS:

• Have another character repeat the line incredulously, pretending they understood what was said.
“I didn’t do it!”
“You didn’t do it? How do you expect me to believe that?”

or…more subtly…

“You expect me to believe that you didn’t do it?”
“I went to the store”
“Yes, I know you went to the store, but what did you buy there?”

• Have the actor who does not speak clearly play a foreign character who nobody in the play understands or play someone who always mutters under their breath. (Example: Swen Swenson, the Swedish cinematographer, has been hired because of his movie making talents, but he speaks no English. That’s ok because all he needs to understand to do his job is “Action” and “Cut.”)

There could be a legitimate reason why a character can’t speak. For instance:

She is a professional mime,
He has laryngitis because he yelled too loudly at the football game,
She’s taken a vow of silence for religious reasons,
He is refusing to speak because he is angry,
Her voice was stolen by an evil wizard.

SIDESTEPPING problems with actors who CAN’T REMEMBER BLOCKING:

• Have the character teamed with a duo or trio of others who can remember blocking.

• Cast the actor a character who is a ruler or rich person who needs a personal assistant to be at his beck and call. (The personal assistant can be an actor who knows what to do and where to go and will be the one who is really in control, but will not look like it).

February 6, 2017June 29, 2017

Behavior Change Through Drama Therapy with Students with Special Needs

A number of years ago I was hired as a drama consultant to conduct ten sessions in a special education classroom at Diamond Elementary School in Gaithersburg, MD, north of Washington, DC. The children were between the ages of 9 and 12. A number had severe learning disabilities and several had various forms of mental retardation. Besides basic reading and math skills, students focused on learning life skills like how to shop, how to make change, how to travel on the bus and subway systems, and other essentials to survival in a large urban area.

When I asked the teacher if there were any educational or social issues I could help with, she immediately said she’d been having trouble with students getting along in the classroom. Certain students would tease others and tears would result. Pencils and other small items got “borrowed” from desks without permission and angry accusations of stealing ensued, along with pushing, shoving, insults, and the inevitable hurt feelings.

I decided to start with identifying emotions and move on to practicing problem-solving social skills through role-playing. We started out simply. We had fun drawing faces and making faces and talking about feelings. Then we started identifying emotions in others by looking at pictures of faces to figure out what these people were feeling. We moved on to show how we felt with our whole bodies and by the way we moved. Then we began to tackle situations of conflict in the classroom.

I wasn’t sure how quickly these children would catch on to that fact that we were just pretending these situations. They’d never had drama before, either in their classroom or as an extracurricular activity. I didn’t want confusion between fantasy and reality to create more bad feelings than already existed. The “worst possible scenario player” in my head created visions of children crying and yelling, “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” at each other while the teacher and the principal kicked me out the front door of the school with the admonition never to set foot in Gaithersburg again!

Needless to say, my worst fears were not played out. In fact, each time I set up a dramatic situation in which one student was supposed to create a conflict with another and demonstrate their worst behavior, they insisted on doing the “right thing” and resolving their conflicts peacefully. I started to feel frustrated because I couldn’t get a fight going! Even with direct permission from me to enact an example of “the bad way” or “the wrong way,” they insisted on listening to each other with sensitivity and offering generous win-win solutions.

At the end of class, I shrugged my shoulders and half-seriously said to the teacher, “I’m sorry. I tried. I couldn’t get them to misbehave.” She nodded sagely and said, “Actually, I learned a lot today. Probably more than they did. I learned how much they actually do understand about appropriate behavior. I’m going to have much higher expectations of them now.”

Behavior change. I wish it were simple. I wish, when a student didn’t know how to behave, I could tell him what to do and he’d just do it! Or when a client is not behaving the way I want her to, I could tell her how to change…and she would!

But we all know it’s not that easy. It takes motivation to learn; it takes rehearsal over a period of time; and most of all, it takes patience on the part of the learner and the teacher until the old behavior has been extinguished and the new behavior has come to be second nature.

This is without addressing the issue of learning styles; the fact that each person has a different profile of preferences, both sensory and neurological, for taking in information. Some people are haptic and have to actually kinesthetically experience a new skill, others need to see someone else do it; others grasp the information best through hearing and reflecting back, and most of us need to do a combination of all three.

Mel Levine, M.D., a pediatrician and expert in the learning and behavior of children, has identified specific neurodevelopmental systems or constructs that each different kind of learning task requires in his book A Mind at a Time (2002). The components within these constructs don’t work alone; they are interconnected and dependent on each other, but the construct framework provide a handy metaphor through which to look at the skills that certain learning tasks require. A block or weakness in a particular system — Levine calls them “breakdown points” – requires pinpointing the exact breakdown through carefully observing the child’s behavior while involved in the learning task, then ascertaining whether this particular individual can heal/improve that breakdown or if it would be more efficient to substitute some other strength from a different process to bypass the “glitch.” To educators and parents who ask, “How can you expect me to invest so much time and expertise in each individual I’m responsible to teach?” and Dr. Levine responds, “Because it’s your job!”

Dr. Levine is one of my ultimate heroes, along with Howard Gardner, Ph.D., who posits that intelligence is multiple and can be accessed, measured, and expressed through the arts, and Daniel Goleman, Ph.D., who speaks eloquently about the necessity of Emotional Intelligence for our social survival. What my three heroes haven’t yet discovered, however, is that the best tool available for implementing their wonderful ideas is drama therapy.

Drama therapy is quite simply the intentional use of drama or (to use the Greek translation of the word) doing to achieve new understanding of oneself and others. Depending on the requirements of the situation and the needs of the students/clients involved, drama therapy can focus purely on discovery through process drama (role-play, creative drama, improvisation, etc.) or can lead to rehearsal and the creation of a formal product (performance). Either way, our most basic human developmental learning strategies are harnessed: imitation and dramatic play which begin universally at about age 3 in most children as well as the use of metaphor for framing and understanding concepts which begins a little later. As drama – watched or participated in – is an embodied, three dimensional, sensory experience, all possible learning styles are encompassed with students listening, speaking, seeing, moving, thinking, feeling, inventing, and replaying by turns or simultaneously. In addition, all the intelligences are accessed at some point in the process. As can be seen in the chart below, all of Aristotle’s elements of drama are reflected in Gardner’s multiple intelligences:

VERBAL-LINGUISTIC	PLOT, LANGUAGE	Words spoken or signed
LOGICAL-MATHEMATICAL	PLOT, THOUGHT	Sequence, logical reasoning
VISUAL-SPATIAL	SPECTACLE	Costumes, Sets, Props, Stage pictures
BODILY-KINESTHETIC	DANCE/CHARACTER	Blocking, Gesture, Dance, Posture, Pose

The connection between drama and multiple intelligences was first identified by the Southeast Institute for Education in Theatre at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in their Data Based Theatre Education model (DBTE). What it ultimately means for parents and educators is that when dramatic forms are used to express an idea, the multiple intelligences are naturally all stimulated simultaneously.

What’s most exciting is that while most of us are not pediatricians or neurologists or educational psychologists, we all are expert dramatists. You may not have ever acted in a play, but you have acted out imaginary stories in your backyard or basement while you were growing up, you’ve rehearsed and performed job interviews and presentations, you’ve even occasionally “created dramatic scenes” for good or ill with the other people in your life.

Drama is like riding a bicycle. Once you learn how to do it, you might not “do it” for years, but you always remember how – that inner balance and relationship between your body and mind never leaves you. It comes back naturally, the minute you put it back into practice.

Of course, you can always develop those dramatic skills further – hone them so that they can be used seamlessly in the classroom, at meetings, demonstrations and workshops, and on the job as methods of communication, training, and clarity. The best part is that whether it’s through a formal class, a workshop, or a community play, dramatic skills are not only useful, they’re fun to develop. And the next best part is that the students who you’ll be teaching are also expert dramatists, with perhaps more recent hands-on practice that you!

I discovered in my years of teaching children, adolescents, and adults with and without disabilities that if you, as the leader, are willing to initiate dramatic play, your students will join in. Maybe not with perfect behavior, but gladly! Enthusiastically! Even students with no previous dramatic training in the special education room at Diamond Elementary knew how to role play!

Bibliography:

Bailey, S. (1993). Wings to fly: Bringing theatre arts to students with special needs, Bethesda: Woodbine House.

Bailey, S. & Agogliati, L. (2002) Dreams to sign, Bethesda: Imagination Stage.

Gardner, H. (1993). Multiple intelligences: The theory in practice, NY: Bantam Books.

Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence reframed: Multiple intelligences for the 21st century, NY: Basic Books.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence: Why it matters more than IQ, NY: Bantam Books.

Levine, S. (2002). A Mind At A Time, NY: Simon & Schuster.

¹ Drama comes from the Greek dran, “to do,” hypothetically derived from dra-, “to work” or “deed” and has developed into our modern concept of drama as action through which something of value is accomplished. Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, 2nd ed., 1970.

February 3, 2017October 29, 2022

Social & Recreational Settings

Campers and Drama Therapy students play with a parachute at Super Summer Camp, Kansas State University.

One of my first drama therapy jobs was to create an arts access program for children with special needs at a non-profit community arts center in suburban Maryland. I integrated students with disabilities into regular drama classes and productions by helping teachers identify ways to make adaptations and accommodations that leveled the playing field. I created programming in special education classrooms for teaching social skills, self-expression, or an aspect of the curriculum. Theatre companies comprised of adolescent actors with and without disabilities created original plays dramatizing their own ideas. Some of this work could be categorized as educational drama, some as therapeutic drama, some as drama therapy, some mixed them all together.

The performing troupes were originally designed to be venues for disabled actors to explore issues of difference and to provide awareness education to non-disabled audiences. However, my actors had different ideas. They told me right off that they were sick of thinking about their disabilities because they had to deal with them “24-7.” They wanted to explore issues that were universal to adolescents like rebellion, responsibility, growing up, falling in love, being rejected, friendship and family. We created many plays together through improvisation. Each play became a metaphor for exploring their struggles, allowing them to fictionally explore and express their concerns, hopes, and dreams. Each rehearsal process became a laboratory for the development of better social skills, flexibility, responsibility, self-discipline, communication abilities, and the development of higher self-esteem.

Making Connections, a play about a video dating service, provided opportunities to explore appropriate dating behavior, first impressions, and unfair assumptions. During our improvisations, we explored all the WRONG ways to behave on a date and all the right ways. We practiced what information is appropriate to reveal to someone you just met and what is inappropriate. We role-played anxious, overprotective parents waiting for their daughter to come home from a date and laid-back, gentle ones. In the play that resulted, one couple arranges to go on a date based on viewing each other’s video interviews, but the girl doesn’t reveal that she uses a wheelchair until they meet outside the restaurant. She wants to be chosen for her personality, not rejected on the basis of her disability. Her date has to get past his expectations of what he thought she would be like. Another girl chooses a guy who, unbeknownst to her, turns out to be a foot shorter than she is. At first, she is horrified, but later learns that he’s a wonderful person, no matter what his height.

Making Connections was later turned into an educational video for the purpose of modeling social and dating behavior to young people with disabilities and their parents. It won Honorable Mention in several video/film competitions, was shown on WETA, the PBS station in Washington, DC, and for many years was marketed by Choices, Inc., a non-profit that sponsors educational videos for people with developmental disabilities. In the course of this adventure, the actors got to “film on location” and learned about acting “in the movies.” They had a chance to share their ideas and what they learned during our rehearsal process with a much larger audience. Self-esteem sky-rocketed when people who saw them on TV came up to tell them how wonderful their “movie” was and to ask for their autographs!

Parents report that the dramatic experiences their young people had in our performing companies helped them develop a greater level of independence, responsibility, and self-discipline than their peers who didn’t participate in drama. Most of my former actors are now middle-aged adults holding down full-time jobs and living independently in apartments. One job coach at a school-to-work transition program confided he could always tell which of his clients had been actors of mine: they had more self-confidence, better communication skills, and the self-discipline necessary for succeeding in the world of work.