Q & A: The Power of Community and Imagining What It’s Like to Be Someone Else

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For Jodi Kanter, professor in the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design (in CCAS), theater is about community-connecting actors with fellow performers and their audience, and audience members with each other. She has worked with various populations, helping them connect to the larger community, and enjoys watching student actors she directs in plays at George Washington University bond with one another. Three years ago, she earned a second master's degree-her first, and her Ph.D., were in performance studies-in drama therapy. "My focus has always been on what theater can do for communities," Kanter told GW Today in a recent conversation.

Q: What is drama therapy?

A: Drama therapy focuses on using embodied strategies to work through either imaginary or real-life situations relevant to the clients that you're dealing with. There are several branches.

One is something called psychodrama, which involves playing out scenarios from one's past or from the future. If it's in the past, people want to redo it in some way. If it's in the future, they want to practice what that's going to be like.

Then there is a method based on role-playing and role-taking. We all play different roles in different parts of our lives, and this method is a way of thinking about the self as an amalgamation of different roles, looking at the roles you play and kind of consciously creating opportunities to expand some of them and contract others, and to think about roles that you would like to have that you don't have in your repertoire. By roles, I mean archetypal roles, like the clown, the child, the parent, the wise person.

And there is a method based on improvisation. Those are the three main strands.

Prisons are a setting where drama has been used both clinically and, more informally, for therapeutic purposes for a long time. I led a program in a prison in Missouri for a couple of years when I was teaching there. It is so powerful for people who feel trapped to be able to, through the tools of drama, go other places and be other kinds of people. It can be really liberating.

There are several different kinds of programs in prisons. There's one that focuses on Shakespeare. Others focus on contemporary plays. And then there are programs that do what I did, which involve theater games and exercises. Because I wasn't trained at the time, I wouldn't call what I did drama therapy, but it had some really great therapeutic benefits. I used a repertoire of theater games created by Viola Spolin. These are improvisationally based, but structured, where there isn't a play, but it's just the process of learning how to play, which involves learning how to trust other people, which also involves a certain amount of authenticity or honesty about your own impulses.

These games are meaningful beyond theater. They're meaningful in the kinds of people they encourage us to be-people who believe in the possibility of transformation, who are highly collaborative, highly attentive to each other, super curious about our immediate surroundings and the world.

Q: Can you give an example of a written scene that you might have clients perform?

A: I have used scenes from published plays primarily as ways of getting people to experience their feelings, to become more aware of what they're feeling and how they might express it. There's a scene that I've used a bunch of times from a play called "Art" by Yasmina Reza. The play is about three friends, one of whom buys a piece of contemporary art that a second person in the trio hates, and they end up yelling at each other and berating each other despite the fact that they love each other. I think people enjoy it because it's funny, but anger is a very uncomfortable feeling for a lot of people. So what does it mean to not squash that, but to express it?

Another scene that I used recently is from "Doubt" by John Patrick Shanley. There's one scene in it that I really love between two women who have very different perspectives on a situation, trying to navigate those differences with some modicum of respect for each other. How do you get inside somebody else's argument? How do you make an honest effort to understand someone who's very different from you?

Q: What's the best experience you've had teaching theater at GW?

A: When I think about the plays that I've directed at GW, one that stands out is Naomi Wallace's "The Trestle at Pope Lick Creek." The language in that play is very spare, and very powerful, and it's a good one for college students because it's a coming-of-age story. The five cast members really responded to the material and they became really close. At its best, theater makes communities.

Q: You've published two books. Can you briefly describe them?

A: "Performing Loss: Building Communities Through Theater and Writing" (Southern Illinois University Press, 2007) is about how performance as a practice and also as a kind of theoretical lens can help us navigate loss. My second book, "Presidential Libraries as Performance" (Southern Illinois University Press, 2017), is about what the museums in these places tell us about who these men were, and who we should be. The Clinton Library is very much about doing your homework and being a good student and working in collaboration with others. And the Reagan Library, by contrast, is about a movie star hero, where our role is to be an appreciative audience.

Q: Your next book, "Improvising Community," will be published by Routledge next year. What's it about?

A: It's about the Piven Theatre Workshop in Chicago. I'm an alumna. There are a lot of celebrities who have come out of the Workshop, but the book is not about them. It's about theater for human and social development.

Q: What drew you to theater?

A: I was very shy. I think two kinds of kids are drawn to theater-extroverted, exhibitionist kids and kids who need a vehicle for comfortable self-expression. Theater gave me a way to project myself out into the world and the kind of freedom that comes with putting on a role or speaking somebody else's text.

I think what draws me to it now is its insistence on empathy. A founding principle of theater is that we can understand each other's experience if we are serious about trying.

This semester, Jodi Kanter is directing a production of Sarah Ruhl's "Melancholy Play," with music by Professor Douglas Boyce, to be performed Oct. 29-Nov. 1 in Hammer Auditorium. For tickets, click here.