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Monday, 22 August 2011 12:23
By Heather Mac
It is wonderful to have the opportunity to share a view into the Drama Therapy Schools Project. It is also quite incredible to consider that it has been seven months since the project kicked off in January 2011! Zakheni’s leadership team has focused on creating the following possibilities for high school learners: a safe context where they can express some of what they deal with at school, to build their personal resilience by connecting with their healthy, creative sides, to provide an opportunity to play and therefore meet some of their developmental needs, to offer mentorship to learners through the facilitators and to develop the learners’ skills as performers.
Through the combination of the Dramatic Arts and Drama Therapy, Zakheni’s Schools Project offers young adults the space to play with their own ideas about self-concept. Furthermore, working within a group can instill a sense of belonging and offers the learners a sense of mastery, power and purpose. Through the group experience and the workshops they explore their sense of self through interactions with members of the group. Through learning various acting and improvisation techniques, the learners also express a wide range of emotions while at the same time they are distanced from these since it is just “acting”. This process also gives the young people an opportunity to master, as opposed to suppress, strong feeling. The distance provided by drama and by the forms in playback theatre, allows a sense of internal control to develop within the child. The expression of emotion can become associated with creativity rather than aggression and the children/adolescents could learn that they can be actors rather than reactors.
So very many aspects have had to be planned and implemented. This project is a real ground- breaker, it feels somewhat pioneering – The project team is equipped with many years of experience and intelligence in the fields of Drama and Dramatherapy and yet still we are all learning as we go, it feels like an ongoing evolution.
Zakheni has employed the skills of five qualified Drama Therapists: Amelda Brand, Sophia Condaris, Rose Jones, Paula Kingwill and Helene Planting, five Drama Practitioners: Thando Doni, Cassandra Hendricks, Chi Mhende, Mannini Mokhothu, and Zanele Siko and one assistant teacher, Kathleen Maswan, in the Eastern Cape. Five schools in the Western Cape and one school in Nieu Bethesda are the beneficiaries of the Project in 2011. Since February, a partnership of Drama Therapist and Drama Practioner has been working with a group of learners every week. I had the pleasure of visiting the five groups in the Cape, over two weeks in June, and observed the incredible courage and creativity bubbling within these young people. Talking to the learners about their ‘Zakheni experience’ thus far was deeply moving and I left every meeting inspired and hopeful.
“I learnt a lot here with Zakheni, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to be after High school, but now I know- I have discovered myself, I want to shine.”
Grade 12 Pupil.