ABSTRACT
Since the mid-twentieth century, the use of puppetry for therapeutic purposes with young people has become widespread and well-established within play therapy, counselling and educational guidance settings, with much of this work addressing the developmental needs and learning skills of its subjects. More recently, there is growing evidence that puppetry as a therapeutic resource is gaining traction within other healthcare and social contexts – for instance, in hospitals, on community health projects, and with physical disability. While there is emerging evidence that puppetry is used effectively with young people within dramatherapy practice and is prevalent among individual practitioners, much of this evidence tends to be anecdotal and the medium’s full potential as a focused and nuanced toolkit has not been systematically explored or rigorously theorised. Frequently, in these cases, puppetry tends to be used adjunctively, in an ad hoc fashion, or as a supplement to a broader programme within individual clinical sessions, while attention to puppet-craft tends to be ignored or neglected. Consequently, these approaches do not tap into the deeper, more elusive underlying creative and imaginal bedrock of the puppetry medium and thus by-pass the opportunity to mine some of the richly intercalated seams of the expressive, aesthetic, dramatic, symbolic and cultural elements that constitute the modality. In this chapter, I draw on my clinical and research interests in the therapeutic uses of puppetry from my perspective as a dramatherapist, medical anthropologist and puppeteer to explore some of the less well-trodden avenues of puppetry and puppet-craft and situate them within a wider ‘ecology’ within dramatherapy clinical practice with young people. In particular, I argue that by focusing on the more elusive and neglected, yet more creative and imaginal dimensions within puppetry and puppet-craft, the medium allows both client and therapist to exercise greater individual agency and autonomy (compared to current usage in dramatherapy settings) to explore, articulate and understand some of the underlying anxieties that are brought into the therapeutic space.
