My personal journey
My journey to the field of drama therapy began in an “aha!” moment during a closing meditation of a drama workshop I had stumbled upon during my seminary year in Jerusalem. Although seminary restrictions forbade me from pursing a production at a neighboring university, I knew could not spend an entire year without some involvement in theater and performance. After all, I had spent the last four years of high school on the stage in every capacity I could – acting, singing, dancing and speaking – and felt most at home in “performance mode.” And so I sought out a workshop that would allow me to perform on a smaller scale and engage in theater activities, which I had always found to be so fulfilling.
As I lay on the cold floor during that evening’s meditation, I mulled over how much self growth had happened just in this weekly workshop and I thought about how therapeutic it had been. “Aha!” I thought. “Drama is inherently therapeutic. I think I just created a field. I'll call it Drama Therapy!” I couldn’t wait to bring my idea back to the states. Of course when I arrived back in New York, settled into my Columbia University dorm and used the newly invented “google” search engine, I discovered that Drama Therapy was already an established field with a Masters program just downtown at NYU.
I called their office, asked them what I needed to do for the next four years of college in order to get into their Masters program and, the rest is history. I majored in theater with a focus on acting, minored in psychology, and spent my summers interning at theater companies and working with people of all ages in various summer programs. I applied and was accepted to the NYU program right out of college, graduated in 2007 and was hired at Yeshivah of Flatbush immediately after graduation.
So I guess you could say that although the field of drama therapy is still ambiguous to many, my path to become a drama therapist was quite clear and straightforward. I never wanted to do anything else. I always wanted to use theater to help people and to facilitate self growth.
I believe that theater is the ultimate form of empathy. The ability to take on another’s role is exactly how we “step into someone else’s shoes.” And so I believe theater must be integrated into schools and offered to students from a young age in order to teach our youth how to understand other people’s perspectives and how to tap into other people’s feelings. In today’s day and age where social media and technology allows for the perpetuation of childhood egocentricity and self involved adulthood, THIS is the kind of self growth we need to foster in our youth. We need to begin our education with lessons in empathy and for this, there is no better form of teaching than through theater.
This is my life’s philosophy and the motivation behind all the programs I create and facilitate.
