Connecting the heart, hand, and head through embodiment theatre provides opportunities for personal and communal change.
IIRP alumna Deanna Zilske earned her Master of Science in Restorative Practices in 2022, alongside Graduate Certificates in Relational Facilitation for Healing Trauma and Change Implementation in Organizations and Social Systems. She currently serves as Principal at Jaffrey Grade School in Southwestern New Hampshire. Before moving into administration, Deanna built her foundation with ten years of classroom teaching experience and a background in theatre and arts education. As an independent study, Deanna brought her passion for restorative practices and theatre together through her community project, Embodiment Theatre.
Here, she walks us through what drew her to restorative practices, the impact this project had on participants, and her vision for the future as a restorative practitioner, educator, and creative. To hear more details on Deanna’s Narrative Embodiment Theatre project, listen to her episode on the Restorative Works! Podcast, Carrying Stories with Care: The Power of Embodied Connection and Compassionate Witnessing.
Q: What brought you to the IIRP?
A: I didn't realize that I was engaging in restorative practices for much of my adult and professional life, but I didn't have a name for it. When I was the principal of a middle school, we found that our traditional disciplinary responses were having zero effect on our kids; in fact, it was having a negative effect. We were seeing recidivism rise, relationships broken, and it didn't align with the way the assistant principal and I wanted to engage with kids. He and I started to research other ways to respond and came upon a project that occurred in the Oakland Unified School District in the past and discovered the Restorative Questions. For just a few months, we integrated those questions when kids were sent to the office. It started with something very small, and we immediately saw a dramatic effect. From that, I began researching restorative practices and immediately found the IIRP. I jumped into the Graduate Certificate in Restorative Practices, and I was really sad when I was done. What I found was that it changed not only who I was as a professional but who I was at my core. I immediately went on to the master's degree program and all the certificate options since new courses were added.
Q: Please tell us about your independent project and what makes you passionate about it.
A: During my time in the degree program, I was intrigued by the concepts of narrative storytelling and compassionate witnessing. And all I could think about was, how can we turn audiences into witnesses? How do we engage our audiences in a way where they're not just passive, where they become engaged in the story? And how do we integrate all of that together? While doing the coursework for the graduate certificates in change implementation and healing trauma, I found my answers. Through identity mapping, immunity mapping, and immunity to change, I found the interconnecting pieces that helped inform my methods for this project. Because I had taken every course the IIRP had to offer, in order to complete my last certificate, I needed to do an independent project. That is where Embodiment Theatre came to be. I wanted to create a community project that integrates theater into narrative practice and how it relates to change processes, with embodiment as the focus.
With participants meeting over the course of nine sessions, we explored sensitive topics such as domestic abuse, body image, life-changing surgeries, cancer diagnoses, femininity and masculinity, and more. They knew from the beginning that we were going to discuss challenging topics. We’re going to be engaging and physically portraying each other's hard things. We're going to be looking at change processes.
We focused on relationships and the events that affected those relationships, with others and ourselves. We used a lot of the narrative maps that are in Dr. Rundell’s book, The Art of Narrative, and explored the idea of our preferred reality and what our dominant story is, even when it's negative. I don't know if we rewrote anybody's past necessarily, but I can say that we explored it, and people were able to hear and engage in different feelings around their past to help them make different choices in the future based on the work and the stories that we explored.
After the very first session, I realized that the most powerful thing was when people were able to embody their own emotions and stories, and were able to witness other people witnessing their stories.
Q: What would you like to see happen in the future of this work?
A: The connection between, and the use of narrative therapy and embodiment theatre is still mostly unresearched. I would like to see the intersection of theatre and narrative therapy develop through further exploration of embodiment theatre in small and large group settings. This could serve as a foundation for a performance piece or as a continued exploration of the community's dominant stories and preferred narratives. The possible extensions of this work depend entirely on the group's objective – whether personal or community-focused. Connecting the heart, hand, and head through embodiment theatre provides opportunities for personal and communal change. Ideally, this work could explore and heal harms by sharing experiences, embodying others' stories, and exploring narratives.