Drama Intervention with the Autism Spectrum
Q1.What do you mean by Drama Therapy?
Simply put, drama therapy is a healing and treatment to people in therapy to express themselves. According to the North American Drama Therapy Association, therapy is an active, experiential approach to facilitate change.
Drama interventions provide a creative space for people on the Autism Spectrum. This helps them to provide a wide range of social skills in a safe environment. It ranges from a range of one-to one settings, drama interventions usually operate to create a fictional context.
Q2. How will drama therapy benefit children with Autism?
Ans. The primary motive of drama therapy is to help children with Autism, with safe atmosphere which encourages full expression of their inner thoughts, feelings and emotions.
Historical Background
The use of drama as a social and emotional intervention started in the nineteenth century, but drama as an art has been used for centuries to entertain, educate and heal. There are several instances where theatre is used for catharsis and therapeutic approaches right from Sophocles Antigone in the 5th century BC to the dramatic works of Shakespeare and many others.
Similarly, the use of drama in young people’s education has long been documented, stretching back to Athenian education and reappearing again in the Renaissance period, when “By the late sixteenth century, almost all schools used drama” (Courtney 1968, p. 19). Harriet Finlay-Johnson (1912/2008) and Henry Caldwell Cook (1917) began using dramatic play in schools as a specific teaching and learning method in England at the turn of the twentieth century, with evidence of similar practices in use in schools in Croatia, Romania, Poland, and eastern Europe from the mid-1800s. The development of drama in education by pioneers such as Winifred Ward, Peter Slade, Viola Spolin, Brian Way, Nellie McCaslin, Dorothy Heathcote, Gavin Bolton, Betty Jane Wagner, Cecily O’Neill, David Davis, and Jonothan Neelands, throughout the twentieth century, firmly established the role of drama as an effective and creative approach to teaching and learning in formal and nonformal educational contexts. Recognizing that creativity and spontaneity are the propelling forces in human progress, Jacob Levy Moreno was similarly exploring the use of drama with children in Vienna [1908], before later developing its application in therapeutic procedures known as psychodrama and sociodrama (Moreno 1939). Peter Slade (1954), a pioneer in the field of theater for children and whose child drama philosophy was influential in the development of drama therapy, was also an expert in using drama as an intervention with children with special needs, which Winifred Ward had earlier started to develop in the USA in the 1920s.
From the 1960s onward, a parallel approach was developed to working with children and people with special educational needs (SEN). Some practitioners started to specialize in the emerging field of drama therapy, notably led by Sue Jennings (1982, 1987), and others began to work in this area using drama interventions developed by Dorothy Heathcote (Johnson and O’Neill 1984). Both traditions use similar techniques (dramatic play, improvisation, role-play, movement, mime, drama games, use of masks and puppets, and working with scripts, myths, and stories), often with similar equipment, such as dress-up materials, a box of clothes, art supplies, stories, books, and musical instruments. Both share interweaving influences from the areas of drama, theater, and psychology and aim to work on similar skills: expressing and exploring feelings, developing spontaneity, imagination and creativity, improving self-image and self-confidence, and developing social relationships. However, they have very distinct purposes. Drama therapists use elements of the performing arts in their work and apply it in a clinical setting. It has been defined by Sue Jennings (1982) as “the specific application of theatre structures and drama processes with a declared intention that it is therapy,” while Moreno (1983) described its forerunner psychodrama as “the science which explores the truth by dramatic methods.
