It is almost a truism to say that religious rituals are often dramatic in form: individuals take on roles different from their everyday ones and relate to each other (interact) in a special area clearly marked out from secular and mundane reality. Many rituals entail an actor, a role, a dramatic part or enactment and a stage or special area where the performance occurs. In most cases, however, the content of the drama is a part of the religious tradition of the group and in this sense is not a secular “play” precisely because it is ritual before it is drama. T.S. Eliot makes this distinction between art and religious sacraments (in “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” Selected Essays,London, 1951).

Ritual drama-is both ritual and drama. Actors impersonate sacred beings and heroes from mythology. Often the drama itself is an enactment of the myth.

The use of the arts as a therapeutic tool is widespread today. Hospitals all over the country employ music, dance, and art therapies, as well as “psychodramatists” as an adjunct to more traditional methods of treatment. In addition, a small number of institutions have recently begun programs of “theatre therapy” in which patients work collectively on a performance under the supervision of trained theatre practitioners.

Psychodrama, the oldest of the therapies utilizing theatrical techniques, and the only one to possess an articulated theoretical framework, was first practiced in Vienna in 1920. Dr. J.L. Moreno, who originated the concept, writes that psychodrama developed out of what he called the “impromptu play,” which he first used with children in 1911:

While theatre groups have been entertaining and conducting workshops in prisons for many years, it is only since 1973 that studies have been made to assess the therapeutic value of theatre programs connected to prison systems. Hard evidence is being amassed that theatre workshops for prisoners and ex-offenders significantly reduce the rate of re-arrest among participants—more so than any other of the many remotivational programs in the correctional systems across the country. Nationally, 85 percent of those released from prison are re-arrested within a year, most within the first four months. The rate of re-arrest among participants in theatre workshops in the New York/New Jersey area is currently 10 to 15 percent.

Hector Rodriquez, at age thirteen, was considered a “hopeless incorrigible” by his teachers at a “600 School” for problem children in New York City. Rodriquez could not read or write, nor did he show the slightest inclination for mathematics or science. He spent his days playing hooky on Lower East Side street corners, or else he would go up to Times Square to hustle money.

Rodriquez seemed destined to lead the life of the hundreds of other players, pushers, pimps, and prostitutes that infest the Times Square area until he met Miguel Pinero, an award-winning Nuyorican (shorthand for New York and Puerto Rican) playwright—himself a former child of the barrio.

“My brother Louie and I were arguing, and this other dude comes up and punches me in the eye, and I start to cry, and this other dude comes up and says he's Miguel Pinero, and he buys us some hot chocolate and asks if I'd like to be in a play written by him, and I says ‘sure,’ and next thing you know I'm working onstage in Sideshow,” said Rodriquez.

For the last two years the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop has concentrated on the workshop process rather than on public performance. This change of emphasis is closely connected to Anna Halprin's concern with therapy (a means and an end in itself) as the focal point of artistic activity rather than with the esthetic or formal elements of dance or theatre.

In a broad sense, the theatre experience—through empathy, for example—can be considered in terms of therapy. In the same way, therapy, especially group therapy, has “theatrical elements,” such as role-playing, acting-out emotions, self-revealing monologs, etc. But usually theatre and therapy, in their conventional contexts, remain two separate areas with only minimal overlapping.

Anna Halprin bridges the gap between therapy and theatre first by being a performer (a dancer with a long history of innovative approach to dance) and a dance therapist; and secondly by devising workshops in which the function of theatre and therapy are identical.

In 1974, Barry Farber, a nationally syndicated broadcaster, placed a full-page ad in Penthouse magazine. The ad, entitled “What Turns You On?”, was an appeal to those who had been having unusual forms of sexual relations and to those who had been suppressing their sexual fantasies (resulting in abstention from all sexual activity) to write letters detailing those fantasies to The Project. The Project was founded by Farber as a sexual minority research and education center, as well as a therapy workshop for fantasists.

A performance was created from the letters received in response to the ad. Seven fantasies (six of the seven fantasists selected were male) were reconstructed precisely according to the letters. In some cases, the fantasist was invited to direct her/his particular segment.

The performance, Another Way To Love, is staged in a large loft in New York City at 127 Grand Street.

The primary focus of both theatre and therapy is the same: human behavior. Dramatic action generally stems from a movement toward or an avoidance of change in behavior—the same process that characterizes a dynamic therapy. The actor and the director confront human action in the text of the drama. In the development of a score for performance, they adapt immediate and ongoing behavior to this action. Behavior is suggested, represented, experienced; the entire range of human response is available as a source for creation and discovery in performance. The function of criticism and acting training is to provide systems to analyze patterns of action—in the text and in the related experience of the performer. Traditional analysis has nearly always been external, treating behavior as an artifact that can be schematized, predicted, fixed, kept in a limbo between past and present.

Zen has been called “the religion of no religion.” It is a branch of Buddhism, both having originated in a single event: the enlightenment of Guatama Siddhartha who, after meditating for six years, is said to have awakened, as if from a dream, to become The Enlightened One, the Buddha. It is significant that the seed of Zen Buddhism was neither a set of scriptures nor a messianic creed, but the dedication of a single man to gain greater perception into his own nature and the nature of reality through meditation. The practice of meditation is at the heart of Zen, and the word “Zen,” derived from the Chinese “Ch'uan,” means “meditation.” Predicated on practice rather than belief, without sacred scriptures, fixed canon, or Divine being, Zen is “no religion.” It is rather a type of training intended to promote a special presence, a particular quality of consciousness with which to meet the world.

The fifth presentation of the Cosmic Mass, a “pageant” and an “active meditation,” took place in New York, October 22 and 24, 1975, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as part of the World Spiritual Summit Conference V at the United Nations. The Mass incorporates dramatized vignettes, mudras, and movements, meditation, pantomime, tableaux, and processions; a didactic narrative superimposed overall affirms and celebrates the unity of all religious and spiritual paths. Earlier versions of the Mass were performed in Boston (March 1974), Los Angeles (April 1974), San Francisco (December 1974), and 1800 meters high in the mountains of Chamohix-Mont Blanc, France (July 1975). The Mass was first conceived in 1973 by Pir Vilayat Khan and Saphira Barbara Linden For each presentation of the Mass,Linden has directed, Pir Vilayat Khan has narrated the script, and Allauddin Mathieu has composed and arranged the musical score.

As Robert Wilson's theatre is more widely publicized, he is inadvertently developing a reputation as an experimental “therapist.” Several newspaper articles have pointed to his work with brain-damaged children in Texas, his early involvement with Headstart programs and his work with the aged and terminally ill at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Although this work was done many years ago, his reputation as a “therapist” continues to grow because of his continuing collaboration with Christopher Knowles, a brain-damaged youth, and, earlier, his work with Raymond Andrews, a deaf-mute. However, Wilson is not a therapist and does not consider himself one.

According to Webster, therapy is “a remedial treatment of bodily disorder” or “an agency (as treatment) designed or serving to bring about social adjustment.” If we accept this definition, then what Wilson has done is very different; in fact, almost the opposite.