In America and Drama Therapy

I just finished watching the movie In America which I highly recommend to all. I thought it was going to be more depressing in the end, based on everything I had heard, but it is a really uplifting movie! Granted, it did make me sob, but I feel so much better about life now that I've watched it. Basically I've had a rough couple of days at work and at rehearsal. The director and the playwright keep changing the script for this new translation of The Merry Widow which means a lot of work for me, trying to make sure both sides approved all the changes and then making sure the cast gets all of them. It's a complicated process and quite frustrating. On top of that, there were major problems getting my timesheet in for the new BEHIV job, I had to wait at the sketchy Wilson El stop for almost 45 minutes the other night, and I tore the leg of yet another pair of good pants while trying to ride a bike. That all happened in the last 52 hours so by today, I was exhausted. I wanted to return In America so I sat down this afternoon and started it. The beauty of this movie is in the wisdom of children. I think us "grown-ups" tend to forget how wise children really are and we lose touch with the simplicity of the wisdom we used to have. Children let go of hardship more easily because they have an easier time focusing on the here and now.

It's really funny because I've been thinking about what it was like to be a little kid a lot lately. In the LOW office yesterday, Paige and Colm started talking about how "different" childhood was for the "over 25." I really laughed at them for that (they are both in their early 30s) because my childhood was really not so different from what they were describing and I'm not yet over 25... Here are some of the things they just assumed would be foreign to my childhood (although Paige said that my excuse was that I grew up in the South...which might be true...)

• I didn't grow up talking on cell phones and waiting for friends to "page" me.
• Because of the lack of cell phones, we would go playing for hours in the neighborhood and the only way our parents could get ahold of us was yelling really loudly or calling friends houses to see if we were there.
• I never had a Playstation, Nitendo, or Xbox, and I didn't watch TV all afternoon. Instead, my friends and I played outside on the swingset, had pick-up games of baseball and soccer in the circle or my back yard, and sometimes in the summer we would have huge block-wide games of capture the flag.
• If it was rainy outside, instead of turning on the TV or surfing the internet, we'd read a book, play card games, or make art.
• If we got bored, we'd just walk over to a friends house and knock on the door, without our parents walking us there.

I can't think of the other 8 things or so that I connected with on the list. If I find it, I'll post it. But the whole point goes back to being a kid. When I was a kid (as in before teenagehood), I would dance in the backyard and didnt' care if the neighbors could see me, I wore whatever I found clean in my room, and the future and the past were not things to spend too much time worrying about.

The kids in In America are the ones who remember that wisdom of living in the moment and a major theme in the movie is about the kids teaching the parents to let go. I'm not saying the girls didn't feel sorrow or pain, it would be an insult to say that kids did not feel like that. On the contrary they did feel those things but somehow were able to keep living in the present. It was a beautiful thing to watch.

I'm sure there are plenty of other things I could write about pretaining the movie but I'll leave it for another time. Let me know if you have thoughts about this movie too. It really just impressed me and I loved it.

So the other part of my title is "Drama Therapy." I was doing some research the other day at BEHIV about art exhibits for fundraisers, especially those exhibiting art from art therapy patients. In one of my numerous internet searches, I found something about drama therapy! I'm sure most of you have heard of art, music, or dance therapy but like me, drama therapy might be something new to you! I had always wondered if there was such a thing and, surprise!, there is!

It's kind of ironic, "drama therapy," because Bud, my acting teacher, is always reminding us NOT to use acting as therapy because that is not what it is for and we will end up messed up. I completely agree with that. Making a career out of something so you can "feel better" or "figure things out" is not healthy. But there is something therapeutic about being on stage and creating stories and characters! And that's the field of drama therapy! Drama therapists work with many different kinds of groups such as mentally disabled or ill, prisoners, homeless, people with serious diseases like cancer and HIV/AIDS, abused children, etc. I'm still just starting to learn about it but I'm interested in seeing if it might be a route I'd like to take with my own education and career. There are only three universities in the US and Canada which have programs accredited by the National Association of Drama Therapy, so it is obviously a small field of graduate studies at the moment. I'm always searching for ways to use what I love, theater, to help other people and this is just one more option. When I took all those silly career assessment/surveys when applying to colleges, the number one career I would be good at was apparently a psychologist or counselor. It always surprised me until my friends started telling me I should go into therapy since I have some weird way of making people feel better. Now with my own depression, I'm starting to see how much passion I have for the subject. I did not pursue psychology in college because I love theater more and I know I want to have a career related to theater in some way. But now that I see there is a way to bring it into therapy, I'm going to see where that takes me. My religion background will be very helpful if I decide to do this, seeing as it helps me understand other cultures and ideologies. This may just be one of my many career fads which gets pushed to the back of my mind as I find other things I want to do but maybe it won't be. It's an extremely interesting subject, in any case, and I can't wait to read some books about it.

I should have saved some of this for another post, I apologize. I just love writing things here because life just makes more sense when you write about it.

Ciao!