Dave Mowers is a dramatherapist in private practice in Brooklyn, NY. After a 25-year career in theater and television, Dave trained at the NYU Dramatherapy Progam. He earned his MA, and went on to teach in the program, developing an award-winning therapeutic theater company within the Steinhardt School. He has extensive experience with group therapy in in-patient behavioral health settings, eating disorder treatment facilities, and substance use disorder/ addiction recovery programs. With his partner, Dr. Laura Wood, he wrote the first maualized model for making therapeutic theater with people in recovery, published as Dramatherapy and Recovery: The CoActive Therapeutic Theater Model and Manual (Routledge, 2024). Visit his website themowersgroup.com for more information on therapy, coaching and training.
Dave's Presentations
Workshop
A Back Door Into Connection
The Use of Drama Therapy Techniques for an Embodied and Potentially More Joyous Family Therapy
Drama therapy is an embodied healing art which works to make what is internal, external, always active and in relation to. In working with families, it can be remarkably effective to help find a back door, a softer way, into connection, in however big or small ways. Drama therapy and applying its core processes can do this, and because it is rooted in the body, it can allow participants and families to not just rewrite their stories, but to begin to live new stories in the here and now. New family narratives can be woven through embodied, enacted, creative expressions. In a family, the body experience is always in negotiation-how do we embody ourselves in the same space and tolerate it, find “refuge” in it no less, especially when being in the body can feel so dangerous for kids and parents carrying around so much trauma and even simply the reality of being a human in a body? Families often find relating to each other excruciating, but trudging through, acting through, playing through-however haltingly- can be the door through which we reach one another.
This dynamic and experiential workshop will highlight the use of the seven core processes of drama therapy as well as specifically use of therapeutic theatre creation as described in the Coactive Therapeutic Theatre Model (Wood & Mowers, 2024). Real lif examples and opportunities to play with one another will offer a chance to experience how these techniques integrate with the concept of interbeing in families and how we, as clinicians can hopefully create a more joyful embodied, love-filled family therapy experience.
