Discovering emotional honesty through devised theatre

Abstract

By participating, the students developed an emotional honesty with them-selves and with each other. They thought and wrote about their chosen profession. They also learned about physical and interpersonal discipline, ethical issues, teamwork and acquired some lifelong skills. Our experience as evidenced by the students' reflective diaries suggests that devised theatre offers potential as a means of encouraging the personal and professional development of medical students.

Pedagogical Discoveries through Participation in a Devised Ethnodrama about Depression

“…Scholars have also investigated how theatre can impact the individuals involved in creating and performing plays, but such research almost exclusively considers work developed in educational and applied theatre contexts specifically designed to impact artist-participants. Researchers have documented how theatre may impact these artist-participants in elementary schools (e.g., Lehtonen, 2012), secondary schools (e.g., Perry 2011a), colleges/universities (e.g., Watkins, 2016), medical schools, (Hayes, Cantillon, & Hafler, 2014), hospitals (Sextou, 2016), and prisons (Shailor, 2011), among other venues. Programs in schools often focus on developing students' academic and inter/intra-personal skills, while leaders of applied theatre projects may set out to empower or emancipate artist-participants in various contexts, challenge hegemony, or, as Boal (1979) famously articulated, "rehearse revolution" (141).…”

Cripping the Ethics of Disability Arts Research

“…The play was an ensemble performance designed-similarly to the multimedia storytelling-to challenge taken-for-granted notions of disability that create healthcare barriers. Based in the devised theatre method (Milling & Heddon, 2005) (Hayes, Cantillon & Hafler, 2014). Performed for several audiences in the Fall of 2014, the play treated themes of embodied knowledge and re-imagined "accessibility" in the healthcare context.…”

“…In Small Acts of Saying, we wondered not only about the selection of the stories to be told-necessarily a fraction of the sum total of participants' lives and embodied realities-but about potential conflicts between the aesthetic and representational visions of the director and between various storytellers. Rooted as it is in the tradition of devised theatre, the play was grounded in the expectation that all people involved would have a role in determining its' devising and direction (Hayes et al, 2014). And yet, within the tradition of theatre, where the director's job is to lead, some voices are inevitably more dominant than others, and aesthetic decisions sometimes conflicted with political positions and research aims.…”

The stories we hear and the stories we tell

“…Students may need coaxing to discuss their personal reactions to events, and their emotions in relation to such traumatic events as viewing their first dead body, being involved in their first death, seeing major injuries, and witnessing the unprofessional behaviours of their seniors and colleagues. As an alternative to oral story telling, Hayes and colleagues describe a devised theatre special study module in which students develop performances based on their narratives and using their own words on the theme of ‘healing’ …”