Creating Life Story Theatre: A Guide for Applied Theatre Practitioners

Balancing practical exercises and case studies, this book equips practitioners, students and academics with guidance for exploring the process of making theatre from personal stories. Inviting you to consider the ethical challenges and rewards of this specialized area of theatre making, this book contextualizes the authors’ original approaches within the range of existing applied theatre practice. It draws on the authors’ practice and research in prisons, with military veterans and families, older adults, people living with dementia, intergenerational community groups, and end-of-life care settings. Offering guiding principles for practitioners undertaking work in this field and sharing techniques and exercises to help develop your style and approach, it also features handy hints and pitfalls to consider while working with someone’s most precious commodity: their life story. Featuring both the authors’ and participants’ perspectives, the book explores concepts such as collaborative editing and co-creation, ownership and accountability, ethics and boundaries, and rolling consent. Alongside a growing interest in using personal stories in applied theatre, it argues that there is increasing evidence for the role of the arts in the promotion of health, prevention of ill health, and management and treatment of illness. In light of the steady increase in a diverse range of arts practitioners embracing narrative practice, this book is an accessible, practitioner-level text on the subject.

Karin Diamond is an Atlantic Fellow at the Global Brain Health Institute, University of California, San Francisco, USA, specializing in how research can be applied alongside arts in health practice. She is also Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Re-Live, UK. She is a Winston Churchill Fellow 2010, researching 'Creativity in Dementia Care' with Dr Yukimi Uchide in Ofunato, Japan. www.re-live.org.uk

Alison O'Connor is the Co-Founder and Company Supervisor of Re-Live, UK. She was recently Senior Lecturer in Counselling and Psychotherapy at University of South Wales and currently works as a therapist and clinical supervisor in private practice. She is a Churchill Fellow, 2016 and has published on Life Story Theatre, trauma and moral injury in several journals.

Clark Baim is the Director of the Birmingham Institute for Psychodrama, UK. He is an author, trainer, psychodrama psychotherapist and applied theatre practitioner. Early in his career, he was the founding director of Geese Theatre UK, focusing on applied theatre in criminal justice contexts. He is the author of Staging the Personal: A Guide to Safe and Ethical Practice (2020).