Winston Churchill Fellowship: Healing trauma with performing arts

Following a packed few days in NYC I travelled onwards to Warren, Ohio for a visit based around the Institute for Creative Mindfulness, created by trauma specialist Jamie Marich. I had a bust few days and had the opportunity to talk with both Jamie Marich and her colleague Ramona Skriiko about their practice and different approaches to working creatively with experiences of trauma. Ramona was kind enough to spend a day with me sharing insight into her work, which incorporates expressive arts therapy and somatic experiencing. Ramona also shared with me techniques for visual journaling, a creative tool which can be used individually or in a group with other to help express, explore and process emotions in a creative and containing way: The final part of my trip to Ohio was learning how to facilitate Dancing Mindfulness, an arts and mindfulness approach developed by Jamie Marich. Dancing Mindfulness is an activity that can be enjoyed by anyone, with particular benefi...

Following an inspiring and thought provoking couple of weeks in South Florida, I travelled back north and arrived in New York City to spend three days learning about Forum Theatre with Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. Owing to dramatic and stormy weather my flight was delayed and I ended up arriving in NYC at 3am, allowing a very few hours sleep. Luckily the time I spent with Theatre of the Oppressed NYC was stimulating and engaging and I felt remarkably unaffected by my sleep deprivation. Forum Theatre is one of the techniques that falls under Theatre of the Oppressed, developed by Augusto Boal who drew on the ideas of Paulo Friere. Forum Theatre aims to enable groups of people who are experiencing oppression to use theatre to enact their lived experiences. The audience are invited to discuss and comment on the problems facing the oppressed person(s) and suggest alternate courses of action that the protagonist (or their allies) could take. Rather than verbally explain their idea...

Following my visit to the Post Traumatic Stress Center in New Haven, Connecticut I have travelled onwards to the second destination of my Fellowship; South Florida. I have been gradually adjusting to driving on the right-hand side of the road, and I am captivated by the tropical climate, palm trees and frequent sight of little lizards scuttling around everywhere you go, which is very different to the UK! I have come to South Florida to learn about the Camp Shine programme, part of Shine MSD. The programme has been developed to meet the needs of community members affected by a mass shooting incident, and Camp Shine offers drama therapy, music therapy and art therapy to support young people from the local area. I have been welcomed by a fantastic team of clinicians and it is a privilege to see such skilled and innovative work taking place. It feels clear from everything I am learning and observing that arts-based therapies have huge potential for enabling expression and processi...

Since my last blog post, I completed the rest of my visit to the Post Traumatic Stress Center (PTSC) in New Haven, Connecticut. I was honoured to spend time attending the Strong Leaders summer programme. The programme works with a group of high school students over a three week period. The sessions use drama-based games and exercises focused around a certain theme. Examples of themes include trust and boundaries. The exercises naturally lead into periods of discussion and reflection, providing the participants with the opportunity to talk about the issues brought up and reflect on how these link to their own experiences. There are times where there will be opportunity for the facilitators to bring in psychoeducative material if this naturally links to the issues that have arisen in the group. The Strong Leaders programme culminates in the participants planning and creating a social action project and an issue that is important to them. This could take one of many forms, for exa...

After weeks of planning and liaision, my fellowship travels have begun! I flew into NYC and then travelled onward to New Haven, Connecticut. By the time I arrived I calculated that I'd been travelling for around 19 hours non-stop, and I was feeling quite disorientated as a result! I spent a couple of days acclimatising and adjusting to the time difference before I had any meetings. I'd recommend other Fellows to also allow themselves some settling in time after travelling long haul, I was so pleased that my schedule had worked out this way. The day after I arrived I stumbled across a play which ended up being really relevant to my fellowship- Elders & Newcomers at Long Wharf Theatre  https://www.longwharf.org/ . This is part of the New Haven Play Project, and the performance was the culmination of a year of theatre workshops and storytelling sessions with Long Wharf's 'community partners'. In this case the community partners were The Towers (residential commun...