Cassandra Ambe
I have been working towards a Masters degree in Marriage and Family Therapy at California State University, Northridge since 2022 and pursuing proper education towards licensed dramatherapy since 2018. My goals as a future professional dramatherapist and LMFT are to create workshops and large format group therapy options for individuals who identify as "cultural liminals" or "culturally fluid". (I'm still working on a term that really nails the multi-ethnic-multi-racial-child-of-immigrants-ethnically-ambiguous experience). Stay tuned!
Traditional Theatre vs. Dramatherapy Work
There are a few things which are vital to disclose to audiences in order to draw a distinction between traditional theatre and performances developed from dramatherapy. First and foremost, dramatherapy work is therapeutic on many levels. The process is guided by a licensed, professional therapist/ dramatherapist. The themes that emerge from the work can range from career upsets to childhood trauma. It is important to note that nobody should be engaging in therapeutic work without professional guidance. Like any therapy, the process is deeply personal. How deep one goes in the enactments, character building, writing, etc. is up to the client/participant. That being said, all elements of a dramatherapy performance are born from therapeutic context not solely an artistic one.
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What this means is the therapeutic gains, client insight and personal development are prioritized above artistic excellence, technical execution and final product. This work is 90% process and 10% outcome. The joy and value lies in the journey. A live performance to share with others is an added benefit.
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That is not to say that artistic excellence cannot be achieved. It is simply not the sole focus of the work. Depending on the time, resources, natural or practiced abilities, and willingness to improve technical skills a dramatherapy work can appear no different than a professional live production.
My Personal Connections to Dissent
It wasn't until taking classes with Dr. Dunne I began wondering about my ancestry (I am a second generation adoptee) and how culture was transmitted to me despite my adopted parents coming from a different ethnic background. As a younger adult I truly never thought about it. My parents were brown. I was sort of brown. My mother considered herself Mestiza, half-filipina, half-spanish. So, I considered myself that way. Though, I didn't really know what my halves were. Most of my life I have embraced being "mixed" and having "ambiguous" features. It made me feel unique. I liked that nobody could really guess correctly. I couldn't correct them because I didn't know anything about my culture, ethnicity or lineage. I embraced my adopted parents' identities sometimes but mostly I just accepted being ambiguous, mysterious or, falsely, other ethnicities that extended relatives said I was.
I began really exploring my cultural origins around the time of taking Dr. Dunne class on restoried scripts and Narradrama as a three act play. This was in 2019-2020. Before this, my journey pretty much stopped with Ancestry.com (we gotta start somewhere amirite?).
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After working on a very abstract set of movements, poems, narrations and a handful of characters literally built from Dungeons & Dragons character sheets (for a 3 seconds Dissent was going to be a board game!) a big life event shifted my focus. My mother passing away summoned forth a profound curiousity and frankly-- magic. In Dissent, Satya discovers her mother's real name, a moment lifted from my real life. I had to know who she really was, why this name was never used and what it meant for me, culturally.
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Dissent has been my unpacking, deconstructing, reckoning with, re-storying, embrace of different 'parts' of myself over these past years. It has allowed me to corroborate my experiences surrounding the severance from my origins and my mother's origins, the murkiness of being "mixed" and my yearning to be closer to the world I live in, understand it and create kinship by creative means. Dissent will continue to develop, I'm sure, over the span of my life. For this is the unfolding of the "cultural liminal" experience.
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-Cassandra