Reminiscence Theatre

Making Theatre from Memories

Pam Schweitzer

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781846425714
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

Reminiscence theatre is about seeing and realising the dramatic potential in real life stories. It takes verbatim memories as the basis for theatre scripts, using the experiences of older people as a source of artistic productions and therapeutic creativity.

This book is a comprehensive guide to the nature, practice and therapeutic effects of reminiscence theatre. Drawing on examples from a range of real-life case studies, Pam Schweitzer provides practical advice on the process of taking an oral history, creating from it a written script and developing that into a dramatic production, on whatever scale.

The book outlines five components of key significance that the form affords: artistic development through creating original productions; cultural development, by creating reminiscence theatre in multi-cultural contexts, including dual-language productions; educational development through the intergenerational sharing and enactment of memories; psycho-social development for older people by reliving and reshaping past experiences; and health care, by using improvised reminiscence drama therapeutically with people with dementia and their carers.

This book will be of great interest to theatre workers, social work professionals and carers of older people, arts therapy practitioners and students in these fields.

Part 1

Reminiscence Theatre: Process and Product

The following chapters are concerned with reminiscence theatre performed by actors to many different audiences, but predominantly to older people themselves. They cover the processes involved in creating a reminiscence play, from the original concept through interviews, scripting, production and performance. They focus on using the authentic voices from recorded and transcribed interviews in the scripts and give examples from certain productions to illustrate the method.

Starting with a case study of the collaboration between a group of older women and a group of senior school drama students in making a play, the first chapter moves on to trace the development of a professional company dedicated to further exploration of the reminiscence theatre method. It describes how the contributors participated in the rehearsal process, how the company developed individual scenes and the overall structure, and finally how the audiences of this first touring show responded. It lays down the blueprint for future shows, including the involvement of the audience through post-show discussions.

The second chapter explores the verbatim approach to scripting the memories of older people recorded in groups and through individual interviews. It takes the reader through all the necessary steps of interviewing, transcribing, identifying important stories, finding a structure in the assembled material and incorporating many stories into a coherent piece.

Chapter 3 takes the reader briefly through several productions, showing how the verbatim approach was adapted to suit particular projects and how different writers interpreted the task of creating a script from the interview material.

The next two chapters in this section are specifically devoted to theatre around the memories of minority ethnic elders, including working in more than one language. The two shows featured in Chapter 4 show how an imagistic approach with music and dance can compliment the spoken word and enable productions to reach audiences outside the cultural and language group they represent. Chapter 5 explores the importance of finding a way to celebrate the memories of less visible minority groups who nevertheless seek to preserve their identity and transmit their experience to younger generations.

Chapter 6 gives examples of themes and structures for shows which have been successful in different ways and which could be useful models for other groups who seek to dramatise memories related to their locality.

Chapter 7 considers some of the more practical aspects of staging and touring reminiscence theatre productions.

CHAPTER 1

Setting Up a Reminiscence Theatre Company

In this chapter I shall describe my discovery of the value of reminiscence work, my first experience of making reminiscence theatre and the setting up of Age Exchange in 1983 as a professional theatre company dedicated to this work.

In the early 1980s, after ten years of teaching drama and humanities in secondary schools, I was appointed Education Officer in a voluntary organisation called Task Force working with pensioners, with a brief to explore potential learning opportunities in inter-generational co-operation. Up to that time, the work between old and young had always been seen as the children doing something for the old people, such as decorating their kitchens or digging their gardens, things at which incidentally the young people were not particularly skilled. It concerned me that the older people were always seen as passive recipients of the young people’s ‘good works’. This confirmed the idea of an unequal relationship, wherein young people were effective and older people were without resources of their own.

Sharing the past in the present

Reminiscence: a new idea

Reminiscence was a relatively new idea in the early 1980s (Bornat 1989). Talking about the past was still generally seen as something not to be encouraged amongst older people, since it implied that they were also living in the past and bordering on senility (Coleman 1986, 1994). My introduction to reminiscence was visiting Minnie Bennett House, a sheltered housing unit in Greenwich, to observe a facilitated session for a group of elderly ladies, in their 80s.² There were about half a dozen of them and they were all completely lucid, if a little hard of hearing. They were reminiscing in a group about their younger days and they were very lively and animated, reminding one another of things they had done and places they had been. Some of these memories were coming back very vividly after a long time and I was surprised that the older people could recall experiences from another era with such clarity. I found what they were remembering fascinating and rich in detail, and was eager to hear more. I felt myself to be in a very privileged position listening to these stories, and was sure they would be of interest to many more people, young and old.

Renewed energy and new connections

As the older people reminisced, they were bringing the remembered energy of their younger days into the present, so that I could see the 17-year-old girls inside these 90-year-old story-tellers. The old people were apparently making new connections with one another as they told their stories, discovering things from the past which they had in common. In a sheltered housing unit it is often difficult for older people to make new friends and the reminiscence sessions seemed to be providing a basis for developing new but strong relationships founded on shared experience.

Remembering in dialogue

I noticed that they were telling a lot of their memories in the form of dialogue, and almost performing their stories as though they were happening in the present. For example, one lady might say, ‘My Mum, she says to me, “You’d better be in by nine or your Dad’ll be after you.” And I says, “Yes Mum, I will.” And then when I come back, it’s “Sorry Mum, I couldn’t help it. I missed the bus. Don’t tell Dad.” Cos if Dad found out, well…’ Being someone with a background in theatre, I could immediately see the stories they told as dramatised scenes. The switches they made between narration and approximately remembered dialogue were so natural that I could readily imagine transforming the two types of recalling into a performable play text, with story-telling and enactment side by side. It was obvious that this material, collected and edited, could form the basis for a piece of theatre in a style of its own, mirroring the way in which the original speakers remembered the past.

An Age Exchange

Old and young agreeing to work together

It also struck me that the young people in schools with whom I was working could learn a great deal from hearing the older people’s stories. If they were then to undertake curriculum work based on these memories, they might have a more equal and dynamic relationship with the old people who had related them, who would, in effect, be the experts. I decided to ask the older people in this group if they would be willing to talk to a group of ‘A’ level Theatre Arts students, aged 16 to 17, in a local girls’ comprehensive school to put this idea to the test. They agreed to have the students visit them in the sheltered housing unit and, together with their drama teacher, these students agreed to try to make a play from the memories they would hear and submit the resulting play as their examination piece.

Asking and telling

At the first session there were six old people and six 17-year-old girls. The students had prepared some questions and came equipped with tape recorders. They asked the older people about what life was like when they were their age, what they had worn, where they had gone for entertainment, how they met boys, how they learned to dance and what music they liked to dance to, how they got their first jobs and what they were paid. Because the young people knew they were going to have to perform these memories they listened intently and their questioning had a certain urgency. They had to get enough information to enter into the period and the specific experiences of the old people. Recognition of the students’ needs made the old people much more willing to go into detail. They could see that the students were not just asking for the information out of politeness, but because their stories were going to be used in a project that was crucial to their studies.

Processing the information

The young people recorded the stories on tape and they then worked as a group in subsequent weeks to develop scenes through improvisation from the material. Their task was somehow to transmute those stories into something which had a theatrical life and structure of its own. They had to make sense of the memories they had heard and shape them so that they could convey them dramatically to an audience. Each girl took on the part of one of the older ladies, so they had to try to empathise with that person’s experience and imaginatively identify with it, however different it was from their own, in order to perform it, to make it theirs, to own it.

Valuing the experts

Checking with the sources

As part of their scripting and rehearsal process, the students then took these scenes back to the old people, who watched with great interest, occasionally interjecting with comments like, ‘No, no. You’d never have spoken like that to your mother in those days.’ Or, ‘We wouldn’t have been allowed to do that.’ Basically they were the experts, the sources, and they were providing a service for the young people. The relationship was reciprocal in the sense that the students were preparing to give back an original piece of theatre that celebrated the stories they had collected.

Performance as stimulus

After some rehearsal back at their school, during which the comments and further memories of the elders were incorporated into their script, the students then performed the play at the sheltered housing unit, not just for the half dozen older ladies who had given the original stories, but also to a larger audience, including all the other residents. There was a great sense of occasion as they all came down from their rooms to see what had been going on. The performance itself triggered many memories amongst people who had not originally been involved in the reminiscence sessions. After the play, there was a buzz of conversation between the tenants, stimulated by the stories of work, leisure and pleasure amongst the young in the days before ‘teenagers’ were invented.

Pride and ownership

There was evident pleasure and pride on the part of the contributors, who at certain points would turn round to the rest of the audience and say: ‘That’s my story. That bit was mine.’ So they had a sense of ownership of the stories as performed by the students. The presence and vitality of the young people had had an energising effect on all those involved and had created a rare sense of occasion in the communal lounge. ‘The value of reminiscence theatre lies in the past becoming not just the property of the old person himself but being involved in and related to problem-solving in the present’ (Witkin 1982, p.34).

A few days later, the students performed the play as part of their ‘A’ level drama examination, and they all achieved excellent results. This was partly because they had co-operated well with one another in producing the piece, but also because their integrity and commitment to this project shone through their work and the material had yielded an original and effective piece of theatre, showing sensitivity towards their intended audience.

A valid experiment

I found this whole experience most enlightening and encouraging. I had seen the power of reminiscence to revitalise older people, to put them in touch with their own past and with one another. From the work with the students, I also saw that the young people had gained artistically, educationally and socially. They had taken something from the old people, worked with it, shaped it and given it back in a form through which it achieved a higher profile. The wider audience of residents in the sheltered unit had clearly been very stimulated by seeing stories performed to which they could relate, and that, in turn, had triggered their own memories and involved many more old people in the reminiscence process.

The only drawback was that, because the students were strapped to a rigid timetable, and were involved in a heavy schedule of exam work, their show could only be performed once for the residents and once for their own Theatre Arts examination. At that point, I realised how valuable it would be to have young professional actors involved in creating such a show, as they could do 30 or 40 performances of the finished product, taking the show to thousands of other older people who had not been involved in the original creative process.

And that was how the idea came about to set up a professional theatre company. I wanted to continue the fundamental idea of a partnership across generations based on mutual respect and creativity and, with this in mind, I decided to call the new theatre company Age Exchange Theatre.

Setting up a professional theatre company: Age Exchange

A target audience

From the outset I decided that all the productions of the new company would be based on the memories of older people and that the performances were not going to happen in conventional theatre spaces. We would take the shows to day cen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• About this book
• Background to the development of reminiscence theatre
• Part 1. Reminiscence Theatre: Process and Product
• Part 2. Participatory and Inter-generational Projects
• Part 3. Older People Dramatising and Performing their Memories
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index