WITHIN: May 20 & 21 at 8pm at the Provincetown Playhouse
YOU ARRIVE: June 4 at 5pm at the Black Box Theatre in Pless Hall
Within
DATE: May 20th
and 21st
TIME: 8:00 pm
LOCATION: Provincetown Playhouse, 133 MacDougal Street, New York, NY
WITHIN explores the personalities and feelings of people who often find themselves on the “outside.” WITHIN reflects the goals of Drama Lab NYC: part therapy, part community activism, part entertainment, part healing, part philosophical exploration.
This is the first offering in a new series, …as Performance, supported by a grant from The Billy Rose Foundation. The purpose of the series is to explore issues of physical and mental health, gender, culture and race through performance in order to pose questions and stimulate dialogue about the impact of these issues upon individuals, families, and communities. WITHIN focuses on mental illness and is created and acted by people living with forms of mental illness.
To RSVP call 212-998-5402
About Drama Lab
Drama Lab was co-founded by Cecilia Dintino and Emilie Ward, both graduates of the NYU Drama Therapy Program, and both drama therapy professionals. Dr. Dintino is an adjunct instructor within the Drama Therapy Program at NYU and assistant clinical professor of psychology at Columbia University, and Ms. Ward is a supervisor of NYU Drama Therapy interns and Director of Research and Training at ENACT, an Educational Theatre and Drama Therapy organization in Manhattan.
Drama Lab NYC provides individuals with emotional and physical struggles the opportunity to collaborate with theatre professionals and drama therapists to create an original theatrical production.
The performers are the creators of WITHIN. They are individuals living with such mental health challenges as borderline personality disorder, depression, social anxiety, bipolar disorder, and PTSD. Dintino and Ward guide the players, many who have never acted before, through an intensive process of self-examination and interactive encounters that combine acting and improvisational exercises with group therapy techniques. The players are joined by theatre professionals and drama therapists who commit to the process in the same fashion. The result is the stuff of the play. The swirl of living, breathing drama is then shaped, formed and blocked into a finely tuned play of remarkable power.
You Arrive
DATE: June 4
TIME: 5:00 pm
LOCATION: Black Box Theatre, 82 Washington Square East, New York
Concordia professor Bonnie Harnden has created a performance piece entitled You Arrive, which is about being in therapy and facilitating therapy. It follows one woman’s experience in her therapist’s office as she unravels the effects of early trauma and simultaneously illustrates the theories and experience that guide her therapist’s work and interventions.
The clinical case emerges in a dynamic way as four actresses each play a different part of the same woman: her child self, her adolescent self, her false self, and her adult self. These selves tell her story from their own perspective, revealing what happened to them at that stage in life and how they were developmentally paralyzed by parental neglect and abuse. During the piece, these selves become integrated and the woman emerges from the therapy office whole. You Arrive is both an arresting and engaging play as well as an enlightening educational experience for therapists, clients, and anyone that has wondered about therapy.
More information:
This piece is an evolving arts-based research project by Bonnie Harnden, a professor at Concordia’s drama therapy program in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. This piece emerged from Harnden’s work with traumatized children and their families at the Montreal children’s hospital. It is also based upon her training as a psychoanalyst. Using performance ethnography this research seeks to illuminate viewers on the process of therapy, teaching therapists (and parents and children) how to help clients individuals “arrive home” in their bodies and in their experiences following familial traumatic experiences. It stands in a space of transformation between what we know with our bodies and what we know with are minds.
In this performance, body, theory and mind become integrated, embodied and illuminated. At this intersection of art, theatre and therapy, the process of therapy and the impact of trauma on the body and psyche becomes accessible and alive.