People living with severe or profound multiple disabilities (PMLD) can often struggle to connect with the world around them. This book shows how, through enjoying dramatic interaction, they can develop their communication skills, learn to deal with emotions more effectively and gain a greater understanding of their physical and social environment. This guide presents a variety of ways in which drama can be used as a medium for assisting the social and emotional development of people with PMLD, including sensory impairment. It fully explains techniques that are proven to build confidence and promote participation, and illustrates how to include support staff effectively within the process. Charting the author's own journey as a dramatherapist, it clarifies in detail some effective approaches and how to address key issues that arise in dramatherapy practice. This is an accessible and life-saving guide for practitioners looking to use drama in work with people with PMLD, but are unsure where to begin.

People living with severe or profound multiple disabilities (PMLD) can often struggle to connect with the world around them. This book shows how, through enjoying dramatic interaction, they can develop their communication skills, learn to deal with emotions more effectively and gain a greater understanding of their physical and social environment. This guide presents a variety of ways in which drama can be used as a medium for assisting the social and emotional development of people with PMLD, including sensory impairment. It fully explains techniques that are proven to build confidence and promote participation, and illustrates how to include support staff effectively within the process. Charting the author's own journey as a dramatherapist, it clarifies in detail some effective approaches and how to address key issues that arise in dramatherapy practice. This is an accessible and life-saving guide for practitioners looking to use drama in work with people with PMLD, but are unsure where to begin.

Experiential therapy is used to locate repressed feelings and re-experience them. Once we feel them in the present, we can come to terms with them and put them in their proper perspective. We can use our energies to truly enter into the moment with all our awareness. The quality of our happiness lies in our ability to experience what is around us. Feelings are often attached to roles. When we experiment with different roles we gain information about our personal history and play with new possibilities for change. Games help us to increase concentration, develop thinking skills and to coordinate thought, emotion and action. They are a way to allow humor and fun to enter into the therapeutic process. This book is designed to help participants get in touch with and express buried feelings in a safe and structured way and to offer training in the ability to be creative and spontaneous.

Drama, as defined by Courtney, encompasses all kinds of dramatic action, from children's play to social roles and theatre. He shows not only that teachers have found educational drama and spontaneous improvisation to be an invaluable learning tool but that many skills required for work and leisure reflect the theatrical ability to "read" others and see things from their point of view. The main thrust of Drama and Intelligence is that drama can enhance and develop various aspects of intelligence. Courtney suggests that the "costumed player" must bring into play many levels of intelligence in the rehearsal and execution of dramatic acts and that such acts offer unsurpassed opportunities to practice and develop these cognitive skills. He uses the term intelligence to refer to the potential for specific types of mental activity and employs a theoretic-analytic method to view cognition and intelligence in a post-structuralist and semiotic mode. Courtney examines such issues as the relation of the actual to the fictional; the dramatic creation of meaning; signs, symbols, and practical hypotheses; and experi-mental logic, intuition, and tacit modes of operation. Drama and Intelligence will interest not only scholars and students of developmental drama, but also those in the fields of dramatic and performance theory, educational drama, and drama therapy.

Drama as Therapydescribes and defines dramatherapy, providing in one volume a definition of the core processes at work in dramatherapy, a clear description of how to structure sessions, a thorough review of techniques and a wide range of examples from clinical practice. At the heart of the book is a definition of the nine core processes which define how and why dramatherapy can offer the opportunity for change. Also included are step-by-step breakdowns of the ways of working with a broad range of clients. Dramatherapy's approach to role, play, mask, ritual, performance and script are all described. The book includes extensive historical material from the 1920s to the present day, covering work in the US, the UK, Russia and the Netherlands. It challenges previous accounts of dramatherapy's history with details of Evreinov's Theatrotherapy, Iljine's work in Russia and interviews with innovators in the field, including Peter Slade, Sue Jennings and Marion Lindquvist.

How do drama serials communicate development goals and achieve dramatic impact? What is involved in translating storylines, such as those from the BBC's longest running radio soap opera, The Archers, for diverse local cultural contexts? Can drama serials bring about positive social change? This book offers unprecedented insights into the production and consumption of a range of popular radio and television drama serials, broadcast in places as diverse as Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Nepal, Pakistan, India, Nigeria and Rwanda. It brings into dialogue the perspectives of the creative teams who make 'dramas for development', the donors who pay for them, and the audiences who consume them. It also highlights the crucial role of audience research as a tool for making drama and as a resource for translating cultures.This book emerges from a unique research collaboration over a three year period between The Open University, the University of Adelaide, and the BBC World Service Trust. This path-breaking initiative opens windows on the intertwined worlds of media and development for academics and audiences alike.Cultural translation means different things for dramatists, development practitioners, donors, audiences, and scholars. Their interests may collude or collide. What accommodations and adjustments are entailed in transnational circuits of serial drama production? What imaginative investments are required on the part of dramatists unfamiliar with local cultures? What cultural assumptions need to be exploded to reach audiences? This book offers an innovative framework for analysing drama for development that will appeal to practitioners and academics alike.