What are possible mechanistic paths for links between theatre and well-being?
Key Points:
Theatre is often connected to flourishing — but how does this happen?
Embodiment is the physicalization of emotion and may provide increased awareness to be applied later.
Containment is the sense that you can try on or experience emotions that can then be safely left behind.
Author's note: This blog reports on a chapter from The Oxford Handbook of the Positive Humanities written by Thalia R. Goldstein and Kristen Hayes.
What does theatre do for us? When we act in a play or watch a performance, what happens to our emotions or understanding of ourselves and others, our beliefs about our communities, and our understanding of lives far from personal experience?
From the perspective of many practitioners (e.g., actors, teachers, and lovers of theatre), there is a belief of a direct, causal pathway from theatre engagement to well-being. That is, theatre is discussed as directly causing people to feel good, and bringing a sense of thriving and flourishing into their everyday, nontheatre lives. This lived and theoretical perspective has been written on since Aristotle and The Poetics.
Yet even this kind of statement (i.e., "Theatre causes flourishing.") belies a host of other questions:
1. What kind of theatre are we discussing? Evening improv classes? Watching a Broadway show? Required drama classes in high schools? Rehearsing a play?
2. What kind of flourishing does theatre cause? Well-being? Connections with others? A sense of thriving? Emotional control and stability? Do you have to purposefully think about your own well-being for it to change as a result of theatre?
3. What does it mean that theatre can "cause" flourishing? Does this flourishing occur only while you're involved in performance, or afterward, too? Can it affect your whole life? Is this relationship between theatre and flourishing direct, and the same for everyone? Or is it only occurring in some situations (e.g., high-quality theatre, but not low-quality theatre) and for some people (e.g., audience members who experience a lot of empathy and feel transported into the story, but not those who don't experience any emotional reactions)?
Often, discussions of how theatre can "cause" flourishing stay within the realm of generalities, and gloss over the fact that, often, we can form empirical questions and use the methods of social and behavioral science to investigate these claims.
In my lab group, we've been studying the effects of theatre engagement on outcomes for more than 15 years. In fact, there is a small but growing set of published empirical findings on the effects of theatre for positive psychological outcomes both for people who are taking acting classes or performing in plays, and for people who go to watch theatrical performances. These findings come from different perspectives, types of theaters, audience communities, and levels of exposure.
This has led us to think about what may be similar across various theatre experiences, including improv, scripted plays, classical works, theatre of the oppressed workshops, beginner classes on scene study, and musical theatre. What could actors be experiencing regardless of context, regardless of level, and regardless of theatre type?
While types and contexts change, we have begun to work on two possible underlying truths about theatre that are true across situations and to think about those two truths as foundational to why theatre engagement seems to cause effects: embodiment and containment.
Embodiment
Embodiment is generally defined as the awareness that inner psychological states are affected by external sensory and motor systems, as well as the fact that those inner psychological states are expressed through the body (Glenberg, 2010; Lewis, 2000; Prinz, 2004; Russ & Dillon, 2011). The experience of embodiment is the experience of understanding and physicalizing what is inside. Embodiment is key to all forms of theatre, regardless of whether you are a four-year-old or a 44-year-old taking your first acting class, or a professional Broadway actor preparing for the eighth show of a week, three years into a run. Actors physically perform the lives of their characters: they don't just think about them, read about them, or discuss them. Actors move and position and engage with their characters' inner lives, externally, so that an audience can see, read, and understand what is happening to the character. Much of acting training, in fact, is focused on learning how to read and control one's body so that it is available to the actor as an instrument for performance of a character.
Containment
Our second proposed universal, containment, is generally defined as the psychological boundary around an emotional state. It is often discussed in terms of a physical space that is created to be safe from influence of the outside world, but it can also be thought of as the way another person or group of people can help with the soothing and psychological safety of emotional expression in an individual. The theatre space is often discussed as a separated space — teachers tell students to leave the outside world at the door when they enter a theatre classroom, spend time bringing themselves into a neutral emotional and mental space, and then perform from that neutral space. The opposite then occurs when leaving the theatre space — students are instructed to leave behind the emotion and character of the day before they go back out into the real world. Again, this occurs regardless of level or type of acting class.
While there is discussion and popular notions of actors who cannot let go of their character and emotions, this is often thought of as a publicity technique, or extreme cases, rather than the reality for most actors in most situations. The theatre is not the only place where containment is discussed as a key component of the quality of the activity. Therapeutic spaces and therapists themselves, have long been thought of as "safe" and "separated" to enable the work of the patient to engage with trauma and other issues. Safe spaces offer temporal and spatial boundaries, including boundaries of confidentiality, to allow for trustful relationships.
What is interesting about embodiment and containment is that they can occur in multiple levels and for all types of people. For example, a third grader may pretend to be a space explorer when talking about the solar system in a science classroom. They put on a helmet and begin to walk around the classroom, moving from planet to planet, walking farther for planets that are farther from each other, taking longer on larger planets than smaller ones, etc. This physical embodiment could help the child understand the physical relationships between and among planets, as well as the sense of wonder and adventure to participating in astronomy and space exploration. A teenager portraying a scene from Hamlet in a drama class could delve into what it means to lose your father and the betrayal felt when family does something you don't expect, thinking through how the emotional ramifications of family issues affect other relationships in your life. They could be reminded of fights with family and how to react and respond when the emotions of that feel larger than life.
But, at the end of class, the character is left behind, and the actors close the hour with a circle of breathing before going back to their other classes. In this way, the emotional exploration of family, disappointment, fighting, and loyalty is left behind, in the space of the theater, to be picked up again later in a separated way from reality.
This opens a world of research — what are the best ways to get children, adults, people from different backgrounds and cultures, and those with different levels of experience to feel contained, emotionally, to explore emotions and situations that may feel foreign or uncomfortable to them? What kinds of embodiment of emotions, and training of that embodiment, could help with feelings of mindfulness, empathy, or other forms of flourishing? Hints of exciting research findings connecting theatre and positive outcomes are out there, but the field is still wide open for exploration, both personal (for people to take acting classes or see live theatre and explore for themselves what makes them feel empathy, awe, and a sense of thriving or well-being), and scientific.
This blog was originally published in Psychology Today.