Becoming a Reflective Practitioner, 6th Edition

CHAPTER 11Performance Narrative as Play: Musical Chairs

Christopher Johns

Performance is an expressive form of narrative presentation. It can involve other people besides the practitioner. In one performance of ‘Jane’s Rap’ (Johns and Marlin 2010), I recruited eight drama students to voice empathic poems that reflected the experience of eight self‐harm patients that Jane reflected on in the Accident and Emergency department where she practised. The plot was her self‐confessed negative attitude towards self‐harm patients and how she shifted to a positive attitude over a period of eight guided reflection sessions spanning sixteen weeks (Groom and Johns 2010). The ‘performers’ entered the performance space one by one alternatively from each side of the arena accompanied by music carefully chosen to heighten the ambience. They sat on eight chairs arranged in a spiral. As I read the voice of Jane, I moved between the chairs, putting my hand on the shoulder of each performer as they, in turn, voiced the self‐harm patient. The students dialogued with the audience following the performance sharing the impact of reading the voice. In another performance, I recruited eight visiting psychiatric students in the same manner. Some of the psychiatric and drama students had a history of self‐harm and reading their poems was self‐revealing and cathartic, illustrating how performing can be such a powerful learning experience for the performers. Following one performance, a student nurse in the ...