Metaphors and Monsters: Harnessing Storytelling for Child Therapy

Introduction

I took as a starting point ritual theatre and storytelling as a therapeutic tool. The stories are one of the most effective ways of how to help the people coping with their problems. It is even more necessary, when working with children. Sometimes, they describe their feelings metaphorically or by using stories, because they don’t know any other way of how to explain what exactly they feel. As explained in a book, storytelling as a therapeutic tool with children, if children say, it is afraid of monsters and it might be possible that a monster is just metaphor for something else. This is why, it is important to listen carefully and try to understand children’s language. Children would not allow us to enter their world until we fully understand how to communicate and connect with them. In a therapeutic story, it is important to play along a story that children has chosen, but also to creatively offer them solution for their problem. We need to be sure that, when we offer them solution at some point of story, they are fully opened and ready to absorb the information. The story is creating a safe space for the people to open up about their problems. In a children case, it is obvious that, they communicate via stories, because they have not built up any other coping mechanism yet.

In an adult’s case, they do have a coping mechanism and they understand their feelings more clearly than children, but some traumas are hard to talk about, so sometimes storytelling therapy is good for them as well.

Outline of field

The ritual theatre and use of stories as a healing tool dates back into the sixth century before Christ. Ritual theatre has been developed by Greeks and it had purely religious, celebrational or healing character. The Greeks has been celebrating the circle of life and never-ending journey of dying and being reborn.

“ Either death is a state of nothingness and utter consciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another. Now, if death be of such a nature, I say that to die is to gain; for eternity is the only single night.”

In my opinion, believing into eternity helps to reduce the stress of dying. There is still hope that after death, there is not nothingness and emptiness, but it is more of a place for soul to wait to be reborn again. Greeks believed that, theatre should heal people souls. Aristotle describes the word catharsis in his book Poetica. It means a releasing of emotions after strong impact of the art on the member of audience. They of course used a medicine to heal people as well, but additionally they used theatre plays, which often led to catharsis that means healing in some way. They have also considered music as a healing tool. They have used a combination of science and art to heal the people. Greeks has used rituals in many aspects of their lives.

They have used rituals to celebrate Dionysus, to sacrifice animals, they sacrifice to the Gods either to honour them, thank them or request a favour from them.

Every ritual had specific clothing and it included cooking of special ritual dishes. In ancient Greek, they had a funeral ritual as well. It had three parts.

The prothesis, ekphora and burial. The first part included paying respect to death one and washing the body.

The second part was about placing the body on a high bed. The last part was a burial of a body.

Greek people has taken funerals seriously. They believed that, the soul of a dead one carry their life into afterlife. This is a reason why arch has been built for my performance.

The arch has many meanings, but all of them suggest new beginnings. It means opportunity, strength, support, connection to the sky. Walking through an archway represents moving into a new phase of life. The next step for me was looking for archetype, which would further help me to shape a character of death. In my performance, death is represented as a friend and that is why I describe her for myself as a lady in white. I bought a white dress and gloves, and in my piece, death does not wear anything black. I couldn’t find any character archetype, but I found symbolical archetype, which are clouds. The meaning of clouds is mystery. A character of death in my play is mysterious. No one gets to know her until the end of play, when she comes to introduce herself. She is approaching in a long white dress with elegant white gloves. When she is introducing herself, she is not talking about herself, but she is talking about the meaning of life and encouraging people to find their own.

“ What is the meaning of life? We have been asking for years and years without any answer provided to us. Maybe it is because the meaning of life itself is hiding deep within our minds , so that each one of us can discover it on their own, without the help of others, freely and spontaneously.”

I take the audience through different stages of life during a performance. I take them from youth to aging and then to the point of the end of a life. At the end, when death is coming on a stage, she is describing every single stage of a life. She is also talking about spiritual and non-spiritual people.

“ All who find the left hemisphere always right , see my word merely as a meaningless tale. Their light will be found on a fearless journey. Should the bowl always be full and financial security at hand, everything else is in the stars. And those, who sense the spiritual realm, only need a tiny hint of spiritual meaning and they will know that the different worlds exist all around us.”

The meaning of our life is changing throughout the time. At every point of our life, we see the meaning in something else. For instance, when we are little, we find our meaning in playing with toys, when we are adult; our meaning is desired to be successful and to be able to provide for our family. The old people preoccupy their mind with reminiscing about the power of youth and it eventually becomes their own meaning of life. At the end of my performance, I attach myself to the Arch and the light goes off and we can hear a baby cry again. That is the circle of life. Someone die and someone else is going to born. We can clearly see the use of ritual in this performance. The circle of life is repetitive, which means it is ritual. If this performance should go on, then after, we hear the baby cry. The whole performance could be repeated in a same way, which has been already played. The act of people dying and being born never changes. In some ways, people lives are not very different. Everyone has to work, everyone struggle sometimes, and time to time we question our meaning and purpose of life. The only thing that is different about our lives is that we all have dissimilar hobbies. There is a point, where character of death is reassuring people that there is certainly meaning into everyone’s life. She is saying that, finding freedom might be a meaning of life. We try to figure out our meaning so hard that we forget to let our brain just relax and not to think about anything. Maybe we are supposed to learn how to just let go and be ourselves for a moment. It is possible that finding freedom is meaning of life.

“ The path following the meaning of life is easier to walk if one carries freedom in the backpack. And what if the freedom itself represent this meaning? “

Richard Schechter describe seven interlocking spheres of performance in his book Performance studies: An Introduction. He says that performance should create beauty, teach or persuade , deal with the divine and the demonic, heal, make or change identity. My performance has been created to give hope, to assure people that the death doesn’t have to be scary. It is about what perception of death we have. There is one quote that gives a great conception of death.

“ Picture a wave in the ocean. You can see it, measure it, it’s height, the way the sunlight refracts when it passes through. And it is there. And you can see it, you know what it is. It is a wave. And then it crashes in the shore and it is gone. But the water is still there. The wave was just a different way for the water to be, for a little while. You know it is one conception of death for Buddhists; the wave returns to the ocean, where it came from and where it is supposed to be.”

This can be implied on human life. When we are born, we become baby, then toddler, then child, then teenager, then adult and then elderly. Everyone can identify us. We have also roles like a daughter, son, father, mother. The question is who are we when we die? My performance offers the answer to that question. Not literally, because I let the audience to find their own way to answer to that question.

Conclusion

There is no possibility of finding out if afterlife exists or not. Some people believe in afterlife and some not. My whole play is mysterious. The play is set in an abstract place and the audience should feel familiar and unfamiliar with the space. My play is supposed to get people guessing, thinking and looking for answers to a questions that does not have the exact answer. I am exploring a lot of secrets in a play. The biggest secret in a play is character of death, which is only shown by a distorted voiceover that is revealed at the end to be the voice of the young woman. At the end, the character of death is coming to answer the secrets of meaning of life and after life. However, the audience would not get an answer. They would get opportunity to create their own answers according to their perceptions. If I go back to my research question and ask myself if ritual theatre can be used as a healing tool, I would say yes for many reasons. The beauty of the art is to bring grace, and grace is like water for a thirsty person and food for a hungry person and nectar for a bee, who sat down on the flower. All of this is a sign of beauty, which we can find in ritual theatre and life itself. The purpose of theatre is to bring joy and feed the souls of the audience by making them feel happy.

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