First of all, drama is a powerful and efficient learning tool. It powerfully invites everyone to reexamine their own behaviour and serves as a catalyst for promoting personal development and change. Drama provides empirical learning through a holistic approach to personality. Theatre is the art of the present moment, because participation requires presence and provides an opportunity of revealing images, situations and problems of everyday life through a momentary empirical framework. That is why drama and dramatic forms are the part of a wider and long applied approach of psychosocial intervention in working with people with specific needs that is called art therapy.
The use of dramatic forms and theatre stimulates and encourages self-consciousness and helps people explore the very idea of change and the influence that change may have on their lives. Therefore, it is used for working with most diverse social groups: children, disabled persons, social misfits, inmates, people suffering from psychiatric disorders, minority social groups, but also with the so-called healthy population. When theatre and drama are used in working with some of these or other specific groups, in local areas, beyond a conventional theatre, exploring their stories, with the possibility of creating a dialogue with the audience i.e. narrower or wider social community - it can be defined as an applied theatre.
Applied theatre and drama mainly take place and are implemented in practice in the form of drama workshops. The workshop has a predesigned purpose, tasks and objective in working with a certain social group. However, the group itself determines the direction in which the workshop shall develop and the potential final product - a play. Drama workshop differs from a classical theatre in the way that the border between the spectator and the performer is erased here and all the participants occasionally play both roles. However, there are groups and processes that are not strictly planned, but the group assisted by the facilitator entirely plays it by the ear. Hence, it depends on the circumstances, expectations and tasks.
Within the workshop, first through games, exercises and creative assignments, and then through a series of dramatic improvisations taken from the real life, situations are analysed and new potential solutions derived. We ask, reveal/enlighten and consider the personal behaviour issue, choices we make, the issue of one's own responsibility within set social standards, but also within the essence and meaning of life itself.
The play as the product of the process may have a multiple role and meaning. It is a sublimation of personal research, and a joint focus point of the group regarding some issue or phenomenon; it also allows the participants to freely express themselves in a creative manner and finally it can be an instrument for a dialogue with the social community (either with the micro system that the participants are in or with a wider social community) and for recognition by the public.
