Spiritual and Religious Identity(ies) and Dramatherapy: To Hide or Reveal?

Overview

Mandy Carr, dramatherapist and scholar of Practical Theology on the Cambridge Theological Federation/Anglia Ruskin University Professional Doctorate programme, will perform a short theatre piece described below. The invited audience will be asked to respond through discussion, art work and poetry.

As part of her doctoral research, Mandy designed a research project in which 10 participants, each from a different religious/spiritual background, explored various questions - includingTo what extent are clients and therapists able to express their religious identities within the dramatherapy profession? - through interviews and drama-based research. Her approach aimed to allow 'in the moment discoveries' through 'embodied and relational knowledge'. (Sajnani, 2015, p.101).

Whilst the participants came from Atheist, Buddhist, European Protestant, Evangelical Christian, Roman Catholic, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and other mixed backgrounds, when they worked together - exploring the above through the arts rather than just verbally - they discovered a common sense of underlying anxiety about perception of their religious and spiritual identities. They concluded that this was an area of diversity that has been largely ignored in training, supervision and professional development, issuing a call for inclusion of interfaith and belief issues in the future. Mandy has devised a short theatre piece in response to the research findings which will be filmed and incorporated into her doctoral thesis. The audience will not be filmed.

How to book

By invitation only. Please contact Dr Emma Harris at eth22@cam.ac.uk.