Our intern conducted a 2-hour Theatre-in-Education workshop with our residents on 11 Feb 2021. Together, they watched a pre-recorded theatre performance based on the parable of the Prodigal Son.

The group explored the characters’ affective, behavioural, and cognitive states through drama-based activities such as role-on-the-wall, role-playing, and improvisation. This effectively pushed the participants to frame themselves as, and reason in the shoes of the characters.

The programme enabled the participants to practice and hone practical and essential social skills such as empathy, perspective-taking, and effective communication.

Moreover, the residents also experienced, through drama, the love and forgiveness extended by the Father in the story, thence motivated to live a transformed life. This was evident during debrief when a resident articulated that we should not take the love and forgiveness we experience in our Faith for granted.

Theatre-in-Education is a subset of the umbrella of Applied Drama - an artistic educational experience wherein participants, instead of being passive observers, are transformed into active agents by partaking proactively, interactively, and collaboratively to explore, experience, and learn valuable lessons from a plot.

It’s our heart’s desire to see many lives transformed through various holistic programmes that will benefit our residents on their body, soul, and spirit levels; and we continue to explore in creative and innovation ways to achieve our mission to equip and empower all to become contributing individuals through a faith-based therapeutic framework.