My name's Natasha and I have just graduated from MA Dramatherapy. So, I run a theatre company called
A Mind Apart and over the last few years we have used Performing Arts to reintegrate children
and teenagers back into education but as we continue to work with young people, more and
more of them express mental health issues and worries and concerns, I realised how important
it was to have a manager who understood the therapy process. I chose it because I came from
a teaching background I was teaching English and Drama all over the world and all over the UK and
I noticed there was something really healing about Drama, healing for me and for the people that I
was working with. The Therapeutic Arts to me is the alternative to traditional talk therapies,
they use creativity and play and mixed modalities in order to heal and to heal the mind and the
body and to bring them together. In training to become a therapist, one of the main things
things that is important is that you do the inner work within yourself first and I don't
think actually just first it's as it continues through your career but the teaching team start
that inner work with you and help you to bring to light some of the things that you need to work on
or some of the things that you need to address both in personal therapy and in supervision. I chose
to study at Derby because I looked at all the various courses and there's only a few in the
country and for me Derby offered an integrative approach in terms of Therapeutic
Arts and on the open day and finding out more about the course I understood that there was
strong links and relationships between the other modalities. So within the course you do get to
work with the Arts Therapists, you do get to meet the Music Therapists and so that mixed modality
was always going to offer something different. One of the things I loved about the uni
is Britannia Mill itself, there's lots of different studio spaces so it's not just the one that we're
in right now, there's lots of different rooms and as we got towards rehearsal process I liked that
I could go into a different sort of environment and change the way that I created my performance
based on the the space of the rooms. One of the other predominant reasons for me to choose the
Derby course in particular was the Independent Scholarship Module. The Independent Scholarship is
your dissertation, it's the final piece you do in your second year but it runs throughout your whole
second year. It starts with a question and that question leads you on to an investigation that
investigation finalises in three things: a Viva, like an interview, an essay and your performance
and then your performance you do at Déda which is a performance space in the city centre. It is a
theatre but it's more flexible than a theatre, it's kind of like a black box room so you can
use it however you want to use it. What was brilliant about using Déda was that I got
a chance to do that in front of an audience and be witnessed. So the placements for me were the most
important part of the course, I learnt the most on placement and I really transformed the most on
placement. Found the experience really beautiful because the theory we were learning about on the course
happened right in front of me so it made it all really real and highlighted how important it is.
I think some of the other positives about being on the course have definitely been the friends
and colleagues that I have met. You go through a transformative process on this course and you
challenge each other but you learn to do it from a really kind, compassionate and loving
place and we're all here for the same reason, we're all here to become the best that we can
be for the clients that we'll work with in the future but also the supportive
and challenging nature of the team, the team that's got tremendous amounts of experience
with a variety of client groups in a variety of settings. I think the other thing to talk
about is supervision, the supervision that is provided within the course is something
really useful and really special and really holding and it's exactly what you need.