September 30, 2013
Drama therapy faculty, students present on nonfiction plays
Sally Bailey, professor of theatre and director of the drama therapy program; five of her graduate drama therapy students, Barrett Scroggs, Laura Williamson, Britt Burr, Amy Tichy and Tamra Patterson; and one program graduate, Sarah Tomek, presented a panel at the North American Drama Therapy Association's Pre-Conference Thursday, Sept. 26, in Montreal, Canada.
"Creating Ethnodramas: Process and Product" was a half-day session in which each student talked about the process in creating plays based on interviews with people about an issue or event and read a short selection from the play.
Barrett Scroggs' play "Passable" documents the passing of a city ordinance in Omaha, Neb., that would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. This play had a reading in Omaha earlier this year.
Amy Tichy's "One Hunger Pang Away" dramatizes the experiences of Maj. Jeff Hall and his family as he struggled with post-traumatic stress syndrome after returning from deployment. This play will be read on Veterans Day in the K-State Student Union's Little Theatre.
Laura Williamson's "Hoping for Harvard" explores the difficulty of finding appropriate educational placement for children on the autism spectrum.
Britt Burr's "Sex Ed: What Wasn't Covered" shares the experiences of a number of LGBTQ individuals as they discovered how to have safe sex. This play will be performed in the Purple Masque Theatre Nov. 14-16 and again on Dec. 1 for World AIDS Day.
Tamra Patterson's "Legacies" follows her family's history from slavery to the present.
"Lucky Day" by Sarah Tomek is an autobiographical play about her adoption and her desire to search for her birth mother. This play had its premiere in August 2012 in the Manhattan Arts Center's first One Act Play Festival.
The theme of the conference was "Knowledge through Performance: Arts Based Research and Drama Therapy."
On Sept. 29, Bailey presented the workshop "The ABCs of Being a BCT" about how to guide drama therapy students through the North American Drama Therapy Association's alternative training program. K-State is an alternative training site.
Also on Sept. 29, current drama therapy graduate students Patterson and Tichy and recent master's degree graduates Tomek, Jamie Ansley and Tracena Marie led the student workshop "How to Get a Job" based on the Drama Therapy Jobs and Career Workshop they took during winter intersession taught by Bailey.
The Jobs and Career Workshop was the first course of its kind offered by any drama therapy program and students from the other drama therapy programs were excited to learn skills they would need to put into practice very soon.