EUROPEAN CONSORTIUM FOR
ARTS THERAPIES EDUCATION
Drama Workshop
DOWNLOAD ABSTRACT
Henri Seebohm and Pete Holloway
Opening Up, Shifting Perspectives with Drama. Back to the Future: Learning from History, Re-visiting Memory and Developing Experience.
This workshop will involve participants in three immersive elements over the course of a two-hour facilitation.
The first element is a screening of a drama-in-education project filmed in Lithuania in the late 1990’s, facilitated by Henri Seebohm, involving teenage participants from two previously separated school communities, as part of a collaboration between the Vilnius Jewish Museum and an international non-governmental organisation’s attempt to establish and empower young people to make new connections and recognition of a common humanity.
The second element is a brief interview focusing on Henri’s memories of the work, and developments in thinking and practice: from drama facilitator to dramatherapist, to dramatherapy trainer.
The third element will be a facilitated workshop revisiting some of the contents and themes of the work detailed in the film and how issues of conflict, connection, destructiveness and creativity may be explored and negotiated through a more avowedly therapeutic (rather than purely dramatic) intent.
Background
In 1992, following the dissolution of the former USSR/Warsaw Pact and the presumed ascendancy of the Western “liberal democratic” hegemony, Francis Fukayama declared “the end of history”. Over the last three decades individuals, communities and nation states across the globe have been embroiled in a simultaneous and contradictory process of neo-liberal “globalisation” (the dominance of market-driven free-trade and economics) together with on-going nationalist, isolationist and militarist experience of conflict, mistrust and outright wars: from Sarajevo to the current experience in Ukraine, from Afghanistan to Syria, through Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo, and from Iraq/Iran and the borders/boundaries of China and Taiwan: geopolitical, economic and intra-national conflicts suggest that whilst world leaders may attempt to declare “the end of history”, the lived experience and transgenerational memory and trauma of previous atrocities and mistrust continues to provide the fuel for hatred, war and global conflict. This workshop aims to provide a space for practitioners and activists to explore such ever-present themes.
Henri Seebohm
Henri Seebohm is Convenor of the MA Dramatherapy programme at Roehampton University. She has worked extensively in adult forensic psychiatry, reconciliation in former war zones and international non-governmental interventions. She has a particular interest in exploring projections and introjections of shared experiences of fear, control and shame through creativity, movement and role-play. She is currently developing a diverse practice as a clinical supervisor to a range of different projects and agencies.
Pete Holloway
Pete Holloway has been a Lecturer on the MA Dramatherapy programme at Roehampton University since its inception in 1993 and is also currently employed as a Consultant Dramatherapist and Clinical Lead for a specialist psychological therapies team within community mental health service in the UK NHS.
Recent Publications
Seebohm & Holloway – “The Shame of Slavery: Sophistry, Silence and Solidarity – some reflections on systemic racism, privilege and class.” British Association of Dramatherapists National Conference, London 2021
Seebohm – “Reason and Rage: re-visioning rituals of personal containment.” Ecarte, Alcala de Henares 2019
Holloway, Seebohm & Seymour - “Thesis, antithesis, synthesis: new articulations of stasis and change.” Ecarte, Krakow 2017
Seebohm & Holloway - “‘The world turned inside out’ - politics, professionalism and therapeutic process.” Keynote presentation Dramatherapy Wales Conference, November 2016
Dokter, Holloway & Seebohm (eds) - “Dramatherapy and Destructiveness – Creating the Evidence-base, Playing with Thanatos.” Routledge 2011
