Poetic evidence: Challenging the notion of empirical evidence in dramatherapy

Abstract

This article challenges the concept of evidence as proposed by established empirical research as an exclusive form of evidence in dramatherapy. In recent decades, health policy has increasingly called for evidence-based practice and research in the arts therapies without considering current insights from decolonial and feminist theories. This literature points to the traces of oppression embedded in scientific terminology, the epistemic violence inherent in it, the limited, sometimes clearly reduced understanding of identity and nature, and the ignorance and devaluation of culturally divergent conceptions of health. Poetic evidence as an inherent quality of dramatherapy practice is presented as an alternative paradigm committed to providing an intersectional ethical lens with the aim of creating space for ‘subaltern’ voices (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) and facilitating a ‘polyphony of all languages’ (Édourad Glissant). The polyphonic approach in Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’ and Haraway’s concept of ‘sympoiesis’ as a ‘worlding-with’ are contextualised to enrich the humus of poetic evidence as a new form of empirical evidence that remains inextricably linked to dramatherapy processes. The concepts of ‘dramatic reality’ and ‘dramatic resonances’ (Susana Pendzik) are shown to be interwoven with this paradigm of poetic evidence. A framework for future case studies based on poetic evidence is attempted, justified and outlined with reference to a previously published dramatherapy case study.

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