Disability and the dramatic implications for well-being: Reflections on "The Rider"

By Maria Hodermarska, LCAT, RDT/BCT

“. . . we humans are suspended on a web of polarities--the one and the many, eternity and time, freedom and fate, instinct and intellect, risk and safety, love and hate, to name but a few.[1].”

In his Symposium, Plato wrote of an in-between state called metaxis which he understood as an experience that, in part, defines what it is to be human. This is the essential paradox of belonging to two things at once; it is elemental to theater, too—the actor and the role, the dramatic reality and the present, embodied moment.

It is also a foundation of drama therapy. All drama therapy is designed to help people explore these dualities of life and understand them. We are never just one thing. We are existing in dialectic and even multi-lectic systems of perception and action.

Educator Liz Falconer reminded us that not only has this understanding of this virtual world existing in between “a world of ideas and the physical world” been present for over 2000 years in Western European culture, but also how simulation of reality “can inform health and well being, too.[2]”

Physical therapist, researcher and scholar Anat Lubetsky[3] examines how virtual reality can help us understand the sensory mechanisms needed for postural control. She is developing a virtual reality oculus platform to measure sensory integration. She is using this platform with people who have experienced stroke and subsequent balance issues. Her work demonstrates the value of virtual reality in physical recovery.

What are the implications for drama therapy? In drama therapy, we stand outside our lives to reflect upon them. Most often, we do so through fiction. The lie reveals the truth. How does inhabiting a dramatic (virtual) reality support or develop functional capacities for people living with disabilities?

“In drama therapy, we stand outside our lives to reflect upon them.”

In Chlöe Zhou’s recent film The Rider (2017)[4], we are given some examples.

The Rider is a fictional film set in the vast landscape of South Dakota on the Lakota-Sioux Pine Ridge Reservation. The film is about a rodeo rider, Brady, who was thrown from a bronco and had his skull fractured, and who is in the early stages of recovery from a traumatic brain injury (TBI). We see this young man working through a major life change surrounded by his family, community and the majesty of the natural and animal world in which he lives and works.

The film, however, is also drama therapy. Like, Sean Baker’s (2015) Tangerine, the actors in this film are playing a fiction based upon their real lives. Brady, the actor, is a rider who has had a TBI. His father plays his father. His sister who is a person living on the autism spectrum is his sister. His friends and community are, mostly played by his friends and community. His mother chose not to be in the film. So the filmmaker decided to not have a mother in the script. In the film the mother has died. The story is Brady’s story but it is not. It’s a fiction written and shot by the filmmaker and crew to “stage” an imitation of life that also has some distance from it.

In one scene, the character “Brady” has to cry for a friend. The actor Brady is not necessarily a skilled crier and reported that he was actually in real life in a good mood about that friend on the day the scene was shot. The director found a way to help her actor weep by asking him to remember bottle-feeding foals that had subsequently died. In an article in Rolling Stone, Brady reported of the crying scene, "That was a version of coping for me…I had to find a whole new way to harness my emotions. I don't think you're very strong unless you've cried a few tears. You've never really lived.[5]" For Brady, stepping outside himself in order to step into a different sense of his being was impactful. Crying for pretend is literally crying for real. Brady, himself, refers to it as really living and yet it proceeded through a fictional process in a dramatic reality.

In another scene, Brady, the character, is visiting the rehabilitation center where his friend, Lane Scott. The implication in the story is that Lane, too, has received his injury from rodeo riding; in reality Lane’s injury happened in an auto accident. In life and in the film Lane is now quadriplegic, non-verbal and uses ASL fingerspelling to communicate. Lane Scott is Brady, the actor’s, friend in real life. Lane is playing himself.

Brady gets Lane into a saddle over a chair in the physical therapy room of the rehabilitation center, has him hold to bungee cords and simulates for and with Lane the experience of riding on a horse again. Brady invites his friend to imagine the feeling of the air on his face, the view of the prairie, the gentle canter of his horse. He guides him to steer the horse to the left or right. It is physical therapy but it is only effective insomuch as Brady invites Lane into a dramatic reality to perform it. The moment also reflects, in part, a Lakota philosophy about strength, that the solution to a problem faced by an individual should benefit others[6]. Brady is offering his friend the solution that will benefit Brady—to learn to live with the loss of something through imaginative re-membering.

To explore real lived experience through a fictional process permits both a distance from reality and an ability to move closer or deeper into it. Dramatic reality offers us an ability to accept the metaxis, paradox or ambivalence of being and becoming. To step outside of who we think we are and enter a fiction not only permits reflection but aspiration. We have a chance through dramatic reality to be who we want to be. Lane gets to ride a horse. Brady, the actor (and, Brady, the character) gets to explore a life without riding in the rodeo, to understand something more about the devastation of his injury as well as his tender engagement in the webbed and complex closeness of the human and animal world to which he indelibly belongs.

[1] Whelan J. 2008. Metaxis. After the future at http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/2008/12/metaxis.html. Accessed 13th March 2011

[2] http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/16619/

[3] https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/pt/faculty/Anat_V_Lubetzky

[4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6217608/

[5] https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/the-rider-story-behind-years-best-movie-w519031

[6] http://www.rodneyohebsion.com/lakota.htm

#braininjury #dramatherapy #therider #disability #film #wellbeing #rodeo #rollingstonemagazine

About the Author:

Maria Hodermarska, MA, RDT/BCT, LCAT is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Drama Therapy at New York University. She is a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist (LCAT), a Registered Drama Therapist (RDT) and Board Certified Trainer of Drama Therapy (BCT), a Credentialed Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counselor (CASAC), and an Internationally Certified Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselor (ICADAC). Her work spans both the creative and applied psychological uses of the theater arts, most often within NGOs, community-based mental health programs and alcohol/substance abuse treatment programs serving un-served or under-served populations.

Ms. Hodermarska is the coordinator of creative arts therapies for Project Common Bond, an international symposium for young people who have lost a family member to an act of terror, armed or inter-religious conflict. She is former Ethics Chair and current Ethics Committee member for the National Association for Drama Therapy and is a former Education Chairperson for the same organization.