ABSTRACT

This book investigates the nature and phenomena of interruption in ways that have relevance for contemporary dramatherapy practice. It is a timely contribution amidst an ‘age of interruption’ and examines how dramatherapists might respond with agency and discernment in personal, professional and cultural contexts.

The writing gathers fresh ideas on how to conceptualise and utilise interruptions artistically, socially and politically. Individual chapters destabilise traditional conceptions of verbal and behavioural models of psychotherapy and offer a new vision based in the arts and philosophy. There are examples of interruption in practice contexts, augmented by extracts from case studies and clinical vignettes. The book is not a sequential narrative – rather a bricolage of ideas, which create intersections between aesthetics, language and the imagination. New and international voices in dramatherapy emerge to generate a radical immanence; from Greek shadow puppetry to the Japanese horticultural practice of Shakkei; from the appearance of ‘ghosts’ in the consulting room to images in the third space of the therapeutic encounter, interruptions are reckoned with as relevant and generative.

This book will be of interest to students, arts therapists, scholars and practitioners, who are concerned with the nature of interruption and how dramatherapy can offer a means of active engagement.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|14 pages

“We find ourselves in finding vision”

Imagination and participation in Sesame dramatherapy

chapter 2|12 pages

Image of the mind's eye

chapter 3|15 pages

The shakkei of dramatherapy

chapter 5|12 pages

Myth interrupting

chapter 6|11 pages

This coming guest

chapter 7|13 pages

Dreamdance

chapter 9|14 pages

Intuition

Interrupter or interrupted?

chapter 10|13 pages

Disrupted narratives

chapter 11|14 pages

Experiences of interruption

Listening to the voices of dramatherapists in training

chapter 12|13 pages

Ghosts

chapter 13|15 pages

Sesame folklore