The Way to Optimistic Land: The role of attunement and theatre in reducing child and adolescent mental distress.

Abstract

This thesis explores the impact of an original applied theatre practice of attunement, on reducing the mental distress of children and adolescents with experiences of trauma. This practice, the Theatre Troupe Model (TTM), was tested out in a pilot project that I designed and delivered with a group of young people with complex emotional and behavioural difficulties in London, in the UK, in 2016 and 2017. ‘Attunement’ in the context of this thesis, is the process in which two or more people come together in interactions and relationships. My research crosses two disciplines - applied theatre and psychology - and as such I draw on Attachment Theory and ideas about attunement from neurobiological research. I apply these to the methodology of the TTM as informing the research. I combine these ideas with my theory of change for the TTM in which I have posited that a theatre “troupe” working together in the process of making a theatre production is a powerful vehicle for healing to take place. My findings from the pilot project suggest that the TTM provides an ameliorative community for young people who have experienced mental distress and that the labour of the troupe - what I call the Festivalesque - enables healing. Primarily, my research is situated in the applied theatre field, and I contribute original ideas to this paradigm. I offer a new way for applied theatre practitioners to work with those who have experienced trauma, which differs considerably from existing models in its unique attunement-based methodology. In this regard, my research also adds new knowledge about socio-political contexts of arts with/for/in health: it shows that attunement is a powerful way to resist divisive neoliberal agendas that can be found in Arts and Health/Wellbeing work. I use Bourdieu and Passeron’s theories of Symbolic Violence, and William Davies’s The Happiness Industry: How Big Business and Government Sold us Well-being, to critique the Arts and Health movement and give opportunities for practitioners to approach work differently. However, given my research is psychologically informed and works in interdisciplinary ways, I contribute original ideas to this field also. I argue, after psychiatrists Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon, that artists and scientists find some common ground in the realm of poetry.