Taylor & Francis is featuring one of my articles among their “Most Read in February 2018” in the Teaching Artist Journal. Click on this link to see their special collection and gain free access to my work.
Ambassadors of Aesthetic Experience: The Healing Legacy of Maxine Greene
Teaching Artist Journal, 14(1), 24-29.
Kindergarten Truck: Participatory Play in Public was reprinted in Routledge’s new Major Themes in Mental Health Series entitled Expressive Therapies, edited by Nicholas Mazza. This series is aimed at the library market, which will hopefully open up a large new set of readers to learn about the power of drama for advocacy, community building, and social healing.
Teaching physical theatre successfully relies on a reverence for the human soul in order to cultivate risk-forward embodiment while demanding technical precision. In an effort to illuminate such praxis, this article documents and analyzes the experiences of novice physical theatre performers guided by master teaching artist and performer, Dr. Nancy Smithner.
在戏剧教育与戏剧治疗之间的探索:国际途径
Excerpts from my 2015 Article “Between Drama Education and Drama Therapy: International Approaches to Successful Navigation” were translated into Chinese And Published for the 1st International Symposium of Creative Arts Education and Therapy in Beijing, China, May 6-8, 2016.
In this article I reflect on the power, potential, and limits of teaching artistry based on existential philosophies of Maxine Greene and psychotherapy.
Teaching Artist Journal, 14(1), 24-29.
The ongoing professionalization of drama therapy in North America has been wrought from an interdisciplinary and intercultural crucible. In this chapter, my colleague Jason Butler and I update and synthesize disparate accounts of the field’s contentious genealogy amidst themes of solidarity, territorialism, incommensurability, marginalization, and validation. Building upon a metaphor of human development (Landy, 1996; Johnson, 1994), we cast the field as an adolescent with conflicting needs for both independence and affiliation as it forges a more cohesive identity and consensus of practice. Our narrative also integrates the international expansion of the North American Drama Therapy Association (NADTA), tracing its negotiation of social and emotional challenges alongside political, ethical, and legal concerns. Looking to the future, we illustrate the potential for North American drama therapy to mature further as it faces the next stage of development.
The Routledge International Handbook Of Drama Therapy (pp. 52-64). New York/London: Routledge.
Edited by Sue Jennings & Clive Holmwood
This article describes a workshop I presented at the 2013 congress of the International Drama/Education Association (IDEA) in Paris with Jason Butler and Clive Holmwood. Using the workshop experience as a backdrop, my colleagues and I discuss concepts within drama therapy that might serve to inform the use of emotion within education and other applied theatre spaces. The distinction between psychodrama and drama therapy is clarified and basic drama therapy concepts are explained. Contrary to the facilitators’ expectations, the workshop experience evoked several unifying questions and issues for participants: “How can we simultaneously address both ends of the emotional/expressive spectrum? How can I get my over-expressive students to settle down and participate so that I can attend to the less expressive students?” Questions of emotion regulation seemed to problematize classroom management concerns rather than galvanize discourse about boundaries between education and therapy. Through a dialogic exploration using forum theatre, the workshop participants engaged with their own relationship to the topics and explored potential solutions. The drama therapy concept of aesthetic distance was highlighted as a means to helping educational theatre practitioners navigate the potentially complex experiences when dealing with emotional involvement. This concept would allow for a clearer establishment of intrapersonal and interpersonal boundaries within the creation and exploration of theatre and drama. The article also calls for more substantial dialogues between applied drama/theatre professionals in order to more fully explore how to navigate the interstices between education and therapy.
with Butler, J. D. & Holmwood, C.
P-E-R-F-O-R-M-A-N-C-E, 2(1).
This article was commissioned by RiDE’s Guest Editor Colette Conroy for her themed edition: Perspectives on Aesthetics and Participation. I deconstructed my street theatre project, Kindergarten Truck, which blended the arenas of activism, education, healing and performance aesthetics as I encouraged audiences to participate through role-playing as children. I describe how drama therapy directly informed my design and facilitation of the project and articulate how a clinical approach to applied theatre helped me consciously veer away from therapy. Interspersed with personal reflection, I also speculate on the impacts and the meanings of these playful engagements with adults in a public setting. Read more about how the Kindergarten Truck evolved at www.kindergartentruck.com
Research In Drama Education: Journal Of Applied Theatre And Performance, 20(1), 100-109. Dx.Doi.Org/10.1080/13569783.2014.975110
As one of Dr. Greene’s last students at Columbia University, I proudly recruited her to deliver a keynote address on the opening night of NYU’s annual forum, for which I was the organizing manager. Sadly, this would become Maxine’s final public appearance before she did later that year. In this blog post, I recount a few more precious details about that night and the conference at large.
Revue, Fall.
In this invited blog post, my colleague Lucy McLellan and share about the our upcoming presentation at the North American Drama Therapy Association’s conference themed on trauma.