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In contrast to the yoga and sound bath approaches, I have analysed a preliminary ‘SWOT’ model of the drama element as a vehicle for insomnia relief in the current Chinese market for Drama therapy.
STRENGTHS
The Drama workshops can minimise costs. For example, we need to invest in costumes and equipment for Yoga, whereas for Sound baths we need to spend more money on instruments.
The Drama workshops are less demanding on the participants themselves. I interviewed some of the participants in the Yoga and Sound bath workshops I had previously attended. For the Yoga workshops, some participants said that they were not very flexible, so they would focus too much on their moption and neglect to relax, which was counterproductive. For the Sound bath workshop, as the music was more ethereal, some participants said that it made them feel uncomfortable at first, especially in the dark and claustrophobic environment, which increased their sense of fear rather than releasing stress. The Drama workshop was therefore more tolerant of the participants than the two forms.
The space requirements for participation are more flexible. For example, in the case of Yoga and sound bath workshops, it is often necessary to go to a specific space with equipment to participate, which makes it more cumbersome for participants to release their stress. However, drama workshops can increase the flexibility of the space for participants to engage.
WEAKNESSES
There are not as many practitioners in Drama therapy as there are in other forms such as yoga. Generally speaking, a professional Drama therapy qualification is required to carry out Drama therapy activities, especially in China at present, where Drama therapy is still in its infancy and generally insufficient to form a more systematic business model.
There are not enough tests of interventions for Drama to alleviate insomnia and there is no script or training system available for widespread use.
Drama is not as popular as yoga and sound baths, and participants tend to choose the forms they know to participate in.
OPPORTUNITIES
As a result of the epidemic, the contraction of policy, economic and employment conditions in China has led to more people experiencing more or less isolation, unemployment and other conditions that can cause anxiety and insomnia, which has led to more people needing to find ways to help and mediate their stress.
In China, where “if you don’t do it, someone else will”, overtime work has become an inevitable and common occurrence for many people. If the drama element helps people to rest effectively in a limited office space (without having to use yoga equipment or go to a sound bath), it will be more popular than ever.
The rapid development of the Internet has made it possible for drama workshops to be flexible in terms of time and space, for example, we can bring in more participants by means of live streaming.
THREATS
To date, theoretical research on drama therapy in China is still in its infancy, and there is not yet a formal drama therapy group in mainland China. Overall there is a lack of professional therapists, accumulated clinical experience and a curriculum for training professional therapists, and social visibility is low. This is specifically demonstrated by:
The scope of research in the field of drama therapy in China is still narrow, for example, it is limited to hospitals, schools and so on. It is more commonly used for the treatment of mental illnesses such as psychiatric patients, while it is less readily accepted by the general public for the psychological treatment of normal people.
The local characteristics and strengths of Chinese drama therapy have not been implemented. As an emerging discipline and field, the absence of relevant policy promotion and implementation would have made it uncertain whether the field could take firm root in China.
Lack of exchange with other countries, domestic scholars are still at the stage of translating and introducing the results of drama therapy research abroad, and the lack of relevant knowledge has become an obstacle to the field’s ability to play a role in the general public.
In order to better explore the elements of drama as a vehicle to alleviate insomnia, I investigated some similar example interventions, the most common and popular of which are Yoga and Sound baths.
As neither the Yoga nor the Sound bath workshops I attended allowed for filming, I searched the internet for similar videos/pictures to showcase. Combining these two approaches, I find that their most direct aim is not to cure insomnia as a disease (as discussed in the last Tutorial, I am not a doctor who treats physical illnesses), but to soothe the body and mind through yoga or sound baths, and thus meditation, which can help with sleep.
Yoga
Yoga is an aerobic exercise that can help treat insomnia on the following basic principles：
Yoga relaxes tight muscles and internal organs, allowing for a smooth blood flow and also eliminates fatigue, thus guiding the brain into deep sleep.
Insomnia is often the result of excess heat in the right chakra and excess heat in the liver, which is drained away through meditative yoga, thus helping with sleep.
A major cause of sleep quality is psychological stress and change, and yoga has a very good regulating effect on the nervous system. And yoga mediation effectively strengthens blood circulation, regulates the function of the nerves, spinal cord, heart and other internal organs, and clears the confusion of the mind caused by physical tension.
Sound Bath
Sound bath therapy is a form of physiotherapy which is based on the following principles：
By affecting the person’s physiological state: music can help relax the body and mind into sleep by soothing the autonomic nervous system. Music affects the regulation of hormones, including the stress hormone, cortisol. When a person listens to soothing music, cortisol levels are reduced, stress is released and the body relaxes, thus helping sleep to set in.
By altering one’s emotional state: music stimulates the limbic system of the brain and induces the corresponding emotional experience, causing one to become immersed in it. Music is often an accurate and nuanced description of the subtle changes in human emotional activity, and can act directly, quickly and effectively on emotional activity.
By diverting the person’s attention: on the one hand, music can mask external noise and reduce environmental distractions, as is the case with white noise sleep aids; on the other hand, music can make the listener less aware of feelings such as insomnia, anxiety and pain, thus increasing the person’s sleep efficiency.
I had a burglar in my house when I was a child. The burglar stayed under one of the beds in my house for a day and a night and was not discovered until he left. It left a big psychological shadow on me, so to this day, when I am sleeping I would like to have some ambient sound, such as the sound of the TV or a fan, because it makes me feel safe. Otherwise, I always feel like there is someone under my bed.
Are Pa:
My wife is a person who culturally is used to sleeping alone. For me, an esaential part of marriage is sleeping together. I suffer when we sleep alone, and she suffers when we sleep together. There is always one of us who suffers from insomnia, a problem that has plagued us for a long time.
Anonymous：
It’s recently job hunting season and I’m feeling very anxious that my energy will only allow me to do one of these things (like take a graduate school or take a civil service exam, or participate in the fall recruitment process), but I don’t know which life path to choose. I understand that I should have a clear idea of what I want to do in the future, but when faced with a choice I’m worried that I’m making the wrong one. I am so anxious that I can’t sleep every night.
Professor Russell Foster is Head of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology and Director of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford and is author of the Sunday Times bestseller, Life Time: The New Science of Body Clock, and How It can Revolutionize Your Sleep and Health.
Dr Neil Stanley is an independent sleep expert. He has been involved in sleep research for 40 years, starting his career at the Neurosciences Division of the R.A.F. Institute of Aviation Medicine. In the early 1990s, he moved to the Human Psychopharmacology Research Unit, part of the University of Surrey, where as Director of Sleep Research he created and ran a 24-bed sleep laboratory for clinical trials. He is past Chairman of the British Sleep Society (2000-2004) and a member of the European Sleep Research Society; the American Academy of Sleep. Dr Stanley has published 40 peer-review papers on various aspects of sleep research, and psychopharmacology. He is widely quoted by the media as a sleep expert and the author of Amazon’s bestseller, ‘How to Sleep Well’.
In this seminar, Dr. Russell Foster & Dr. Neil Stanley divided the factors that affect people’s sleep into 5 areas, which means we can think about how to alleviate short-term insomnia in these 5 areas.
I. Food Although it is a cliché, it has to be said that food is a major factor affecting sleep. Whenever people think it would be a shame to miss a good meal on some special occasion, the digestion of food is bound to take up your sleep time.
II. Changes in the seasons Individual sleep patterns change from season to season, especially during the long summer days when we lack a long enough night, which disrupts our bodies in the dark cycle of natural light, so the season is also a cause of your brief insomnia.
III. Technology For example, Social media, emails or messages that ring in the early hours of the morning and people feel I need to respond to them, technology erodes people’s sleep when the alarm goes off. Another example is the television, which I strongly advise against having in the bedroom.
IV. Work Examples include the time taken up by overtime and the anxiety caused by work.
V. Mindset For modern people, in many cases, sleeping is no longer something to enjoy, but something you have to do. For example, many people are anxious about whether I will die if I don’t get eight hours of sleep a day. But one of the first things to get right is the mindset that “Having a good night’s sleep is not about living longer, it’s about living better!”
Answers on the use of medication for insomnia.
When we consult a hospital for insomnia symptoms, the doctor will usually give us some medication for the treatment. For the patient, they just want to see quick results and for the doctor, he wants to get to the point where the patient can leave without any problems, but I do not recommend this for short-term insomnia.
Face-to-face therapy is an effective method, and we all know how to stay calm, we just don’t bother to do it. It’s important to redefine your sleeping space. People tend to pay a lot of attention to their clothes or shoes when shopping, but neglect to define their sleeping space. The next time you are shopping you can think about which elements are beneficial to your room and rearrange your room. Separation of work and sleep locations is recommended.
1. A fuller warm-up session would help me to get into shape more quickly.
2. The sun‘s rays distract me a bit, although when I closed my eyes, perhaps the imaginary part of the cave would have been perfect indoors or in the evening, but I enjoyed the relaxing part at the end.
3. The soundtrack kept me engrossed, but perhaps because I was outside, the sound of children playing nearby sometimes interrupted my concentration.
4. Maybe the music player could be a little louder.
When I tried to put last week’s idea into practice, I found that I had failed again. I wanted to start with the theatre story itself, but I got lost and then I found a book in the corner of the theatre-related books on the third floor of the school library, and a passage in it struck me.
The following day I went to the lawn behind Westminster Cathedral, which has a children’s area. I sat there and observed it all afternoon and found some interesting phenomena. There were five children gathered around and starting a role-playing game, with other children trying to join them at the back. Some of the children fitted in quickly, but one girl kept holding her mother’s hand and wanted to join in but was afraid to, and another boy kept trying to take on the role of leader of the game to the displeasure of the other children.
This children’s game is a microcosm of society, and in fact the problems that Chinese children have in interacting with others are even more evident. Most parents “protect” their children so well that they think “the grass is dirty”, “if you get wet, you will catch a cold”, etc. As a result, children do not know how to better participate in groups and interact with others. And children do not know how to participate better in the group and interact with others. As far as I know from the literature, the drama in education approach is very popular in Europe, but it is still a new industry in China. At the same time, much of the research on drama in education focuses on children’s learning at school but neglects the development of children’s emotional quotient after school. How can outdoor drama develop children’s Emotional Quotient while enhancing their ability to integrate into the community？This is the question I started to think about.
Traditional Chinese opera should not force traditional ideas on modern people for the sake of heritage; instead, some parts of it should die, the implication being that it should become more inclusive.
In all my previous research, I have found that all the recreations of traditional Chinese opera culture have been selected from the best parts of it. For example, its voice, its acrobatics, its stage art. This made me reflect on my own conditions. Firstly, I am not good at singing, dancing, painting and other skills, which means that I do not need to choose the best parts of Chinese opera and repeat them as others do; secondly, since I am now studying abroad, there must be some content that I can present abroad but cannot do so in the domestic educational environment.
This reminds me of the large number of opera plays I used to read, all of which have one common feature: they all seek a Great Reunion. The Great Reunion refer to here is not the Happy Ending as we understand it in the modern sense, but rather the patterned ending of the feudal period in which the main character or the family, after repeated struggles, finally comes together happily. But such plots are often incompatible with modern values, e.g. polygamy, bad wives. A friend of mine who works as a China opera director said after he read The Story Of Lute, “To be honest, I think the hero should go to hell and the first and second female should stay together.” Although this was a joke, it reflects the values demanded by the younger generation and the fact that we don’t see many Chinese opera productions revising the ‘dross’ of the plot at the moment.
Although many stories in Chinese opera reflect the good spirit of the Chinese nation, it is undeniable that there are complex historical and cultural reasons behind the ‘Grand Reunion’ becoming a structural pattern in classical Chinese opera. In The Evolution of Literature and the Improvement of Drama, Mr Hu Shi said that “this superstition of ‘ Grand Reunion ‘ is hard evidence of the weakness of the Chinese mind.” He argues that the preferred ‘ Grand Reunion ‘ shows the mentality of the Chinese people who are afraid to face up to their flaws and only want to whitewash the situation, which is a manifestation of self-deception. At the same time, this model should be abandoned by modern values.
Therefore, I wanted to design an intervention. The story line is designed as a ‘chessboard’ in which each character is a ‘chess’. Interested participants are allowed to participate in these stories, and it is entirely up to the participants to decide where these ‘chesses’ end up. In this way, I hope that, on the one hand, the audience can learn about Chinese opera through the game, and on the other hand, by collecting their ‘chessboard layout’, I can better help the traditional stories to be adapted by eliminating the parts that are not in line with modern values.
The White Snake is the first 4K panoramic sound Cantonese opera film in China created by Pearl River Film Group Limited and Guangdong Cantonese Opera Theatre, a good case of making a commercial film out of traditional Chinese opera.
The inclusion of Western instruments, the use of ink paintings and the use of special effects is a new way of presenting traditional Chinese opera to the audience and has been well received by many young audiences.
Unlike traditional opera stages of the past, the images are not highly saturated with harsh colours, and the whole is soothing and serene, just like an ink painting. Director Zhang Xianfeng explains that the story of The Legend of the White Snake takes place in the Song Dynasty, the pinnacle of Chinese aesthetics. Therefore, he wanted to incorporate Song Dynasty paintings into the traditional opera.
Meanwhile, styling director Wang Xiaoxia innovated the use of botanical haloes in order to give the costumes a softer colour presentation. She also went to a friend in the Chinese painting department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and hand-painted the pattern after the fabric was finished, and finally added the hand embroidery. This makes the whole costume path more in line with modern aesthetics
A sequence in which the film uses “Flowing sleeves” (long sleeves in Chinese opera costume) as a weapon in a fight makes Chinese opera elements more resilient in the film.
Even if the film is not quite perfect, it has certainly found a new stage for traditional Chinese opera and has explored new commercial models for traditional opera culture as well. It has also led many audiences who do not understand Cantonese, even younger ones, to appreciate this traditional culture.
“Xi Qu” is a unique term for traditional Chinese opera, dating back to the Qin Dynasty. It originated from primitive song and dance and is a comprehensive stage art style with a long history. In brief, traditional Chinese opera is an intangible cultural heritage of China.
Precise question:
How can I incorporate elements of Chinese opera into daily life so that traditional culture can be passed on and at the same time make daily life more interesting?
Main Stakeholders:
Youth and Chinese Opera artists
WHY
Personal Reasons:
When I was in primary school my grandmother always took me to the little theatre to watch Cantonese opera puppet shows (a Chinese opera genre), which had gradually disappeared by the time I was in high school.
During my studies in England, I went to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and was amazed to find centuries-old theatre types always being sold out.
Social Reasons:
Chinese opera is China’s national treasure and is a very important part of traditional Chinese culture.
The process of forming Chinese opera is a synthesis of various artistic disciplines.
Nowadays young people have become distant from this traditional valuable culture.
HOW
Identify Problems (Until 16 May)
Through reading literature and interviewing parents of children, I found that the government has introduced policies for the preservation of Chinese opera. But why does it still not spread well to young audiences?
Research Problems (Until 20 June)
Through interviews with experts, I have now concluded the following reasons.
The stories of traditional Chinese opera have not kept pace with the times.
The tempo of Chinese opera music is too slow.
The demise of some dialects has also led to the decline of traditional Chinese opera.
The development of modern media has enriched people’s lives and diverted audiences fromChinese opera.
Chinese opera is visually incompatible with the aesthetics of young people.
Solve Problems (Until 1 December)
Intervention I did (An idea)
By using elements of Chinese opera combined with modern popular elements (e.g. Marvel), the aim is to arouse the interest of young people. And then applied to young people’s everyday items (e.g. School uniforms).
I invited primary school students to come to my online workshops, they have designed their school uniforms with elements of Chinese opera.
Future interventions
Explore more modern forms that can incorporate elements of Chinese opera and bring it into the lives of young people, such as shopping bags, masks, etc.
WHAT IF
For Chinese opera artists
It can help Chinese opera artists to find new ways of expression and inject young energy into the art of Chinese opera.
For youth
They can be exposed to traditional Chinese opera culture in an interesting way in their daily lives so that they can learn more about it and use it as their own personal label.
For parents
Participation in Chinese opera can be a vehicle for parents and children to bring them closer together and create family memories.
