IJCAIP Featured Article

Ethnodramas About Health and Illness

Staging Human Vulnerability, Fragility, and Resiliency

Johnny Saldaña

We are all vulnerable and fragile human beings, regardless of situation, circumstance, or social context. Resiliency, however, varies from person to person depending on his or her personality. Vulnerability's root meaning is "to wound," with its most salient definitions as "defenseless against injury" and "open to attack or damage." Fragility's root is "to break," and is defined as something "easily broken or destroyed." In the context of this paper, fragility's other definitions include "delicate health" and "unusually susceptible to ill health or physical harm."

As for resiliency, there are multiple roots, including "to jump back," "rebound," and "leap." Though the first definition is "returning freely to a previous position, shape, condition," in the contexts of health and illness these ideas resonate: "capable of withstanding shock without permanent deformation"; and "to regain strength or high spirits after weakness or depression."

I am a theatre artist, and certainly not an expert in the quantitative and qualitative research literature about health and illness. But I speculate that themes of vulnerability, fragility, and resiliency weave throughout most of these studies, for they are most apparent in the related ethnodramatic literature.

Overview

In this paper, I share a descriptive, selected literature review of 38 ethnodramatic play scripts about health and illness.¹ A few of these titles are documented play productions but without available written play scripts for analysis. I include excerpts from exemplars of the genre, hoping that these may serve as a sampler of models for the reader's own ethnodramatic writing. I will focus on the four most frequently addressed topics in this genre: cancer, health care, HIV/AIDS, and substance abuse/addiction.

Before proceeding, definitions of two key terms are needed:

Ethnotheatre employs the traditional craft and artistic techniques of theatre production to mount for an audience a live performance event of research participants' experiences and/or the researcher's interpretations of data. . . . The goal is to investigate a particular facet of the human condition for purposes of adapting those observations and insights into a performance medium. Simply put, this is preparatory fieldwork for theatrical production work.

An ethnodrama, the written script, consists of dramatized, significant selections of narrative collected through interviews, participant observation field notes, journal entries, and/or print and media artifacts such as diaries, television broadcasts, newspaper articles, and court proceedings. Simply put, this is dramatizing the data. (Saldaña, 2005, pp. 1-2)

The non-theatre-going public is perhaps more familiar with commercial films and television programs about health and illness. These titles include such works as Philadelphia, Wit, ER, Grey's Anatomy, and others. Illness may not play a central role in selected film plots but can become a major component of story lines in such fictional works as Steel Magnolias, Angels in America, and Terms of Endearment. Most ethnodramatic work about the subject originates from the academic and scientific communities, with a handful of works by theatre artists and performance studies scholars with social or personal investment in health and illness issues. The history of theatre and its contemporary forms include documentation of performance events and dramatic modalities with pedagogic albeit sometimes didactic goals. Medieval morality plays preached wholesome spiritual living to the European masses; puppet plays are performed in Mexico to teach children proper hygiene; drama therapy utilizes improvisational work for psychotherapeutic goals; and digital storytelling projects are conducted in children's hospitals with terminally ill patients.

Ethnodramatic representations and presentations of health and illness bring participants' vulnerability, fragility, and, in most cases, resiliency to heightened prominence. Perhaps more than the academic journal article, the ethnotheatrical performance—if well done for a receptive audience—holds potential to increase awareness, deepen understanding, and provide experiences that generate sympathetic and empathetic responses and memories for future applications and transfer into clinical practice and possibly health care policy. If the shared goal of theatre and qualitative inquiry is to explore and learn more about the human condition, then the outcomes are doubly if not exponentially increased when the two disciplines merge, bringing with them their best representational and presentational modes of expression to the dramatic text.

Categorizations of ethnodramas about health and illness can be approached from multiple angles, but in this paper I classify these selected works by the specific health or illness issue addressed in the plays.

Cancer

In the ethnodramatic bibliography, the majority of plays about illness address cancer, with women's breast cancer as the most frequent subtopic. This category includes works about:

• women's breast cancer (Gray & Sinding, 2002; Miller, 2006; Park-Fuller, 2003)

• prostate cancer's effects on men and their spouses (Gray & Sinding, 2002)

• an ovarian cancer survivor (Shapiro & Hunt, 2003)

• a gay man's comic struggle with cancer (Lobel, 2007)

• communications between a physician and a cancer patient (Paget, 1995)

• a father's cancer and her daughter's struggle with his illness (Mulcahy, Parry, & Glover, 2009)

Ethnodramas about cancer range from the monologic and realistic one-woman play, to dialogic and expressionistic ensemble work. Character representations include the cancer survivors themselves, their caregivers, and significant others coping with their loved ones' illness. A few plays include symbolic representations as characters, suggesting a need to abstract the magnitude of the illness in order to grasp and make sense of it.

Perhaps the most-performed play about women's breast cancer is Susan Miller's (2006) autoethnodramatic My Left Breast. The opening scene of her comedy-drama sets the tone of a woman both vulnerable and resilient with her immediate disclosure to the audience:

(Music begins in the dark. It continues as the lights come up. SUSAN comes out dancing. After a few bars, the music stops and she takes in the audience.)

The night before I went to the hospital, that's what I did. I danced.
(Holding hands over her breasts:)

One of these is not real.
Can you tell which?
(Beat.)

I was fourteen the first time a boy touched my breast. My left breast, in fact. I felt so guilty with pleasure I could hardly face my parents that night. It was exquisite. Well, you remember. . . .
(Beat.)

Anyhow, breast cancer.
(Beat.)

Here's what I wear sometimes under my clothes.
(Take breast prosthesis from desk. Hold up to show audience:)

Oh, don't worry. It's a spare. When you go for a fitting, you can hear the women in the other booths. Some of them have lost their hair and shop for wigs. Some are very young and their mothers are thinking, why didn't this happen to me, instead?
(Beat.)

I miss it, but it's not a hand. I miss it, but it's not my mind. I miss it, but it's not the roof over my head. I miss it, but it's not a word I need. It's not a sentence I can't live without. I miss it, but it's not a conversation with my son. It's not my courage or my lack of faith.
(Beat.)

I miss it, but it's not HER. (pp. 5-6)

As a dialogic example of ethnodrama (a form underutilized in the genre), Mulchay, Parry, and Glover (2009) researched people with cancer and created Between Diagnosis and Death. In this play, the Father is a composite character whose words are taken from multiple interviewees' transcripts, but Caitlin M. Mulcahy, one of the co-authors, served as the basis for the Daughter. Vulnerability and fragility are experienced not just by the ill but also by their family members. In the scene below, Father and Daughter are sitting on a park bench on a cold day. The Daughter is "haunted by a ghost she cannot escape" (p. 30), but the character appears onstage alongside her. Notice the italicized stage directions in the excerpt, evoking not just character action but subtext and irony for audiences:

(Her father coughs into his gloves)
FATHER: I was in bad shape when I was diagnosed.
DAUGHTER: Oh god. It's starting.
GHOST: What's starting?
FATHER: And I was not given a good diagnosis. I was told I may have two to three years to live. (shakes his head) There was no explanation. None. (long pause)
DAUGHTER: (to Ghost) Oh he's pausing, but he won't stop there. The story never ends. It's on loop. I don't know what he's looking for, but he never finds it.
FATHER: You're not prepared. When you get that diagnosis . . . the whole world goes out of whack! (gestures wildly) Everything goes crazy! Your mind goes through the worst scenario. . . . It's just awful . . . we just deal with these horrible diagnoses and we don't have anything to help with something like that.
GHOST: (circling downstage right) It's hard to write about this stuff when you have a parent who has cancer. Your co-authors know that. They've both gone through cancer with their own parents. They'll understand.
DAUGHTER: (snorts) If you think the writing's hard, you should try listening to this stuff all the time. It's the listening that's driving me crazy. (checking pockets) Where's my iPod? Did I leave it at home? (fumbles through pockets for iPod while Father continues)
FATHER: (sniffs) When you're in treatment, cancer's in your face every day. It's impossible to be getting on with your life. Your life is on hold. And then, you finish treatment and then what, you know? (wipes a glove across his nose)
DAUGHTER: (exasperated) Where is it, for god's sakes?! (He pulls out a fistful of Kleenex and blows his nose. She finds her iPod.)
DAUGHTER: Yes! (puts headphones in ears)
FATHER: I found it to be extremely isolating going through the treatments. And when you go to a clinic, nobody talks to anyone. They're in their own space. You know it's as if they were all on iPods, cancer iPods, or something. (She sighs and tucks her iPod back into her pocket.)
DAUGHTER: I guess that's the end of that.
FATHER: They're just in their own space . . . Or they're weak. Or they're nauseated or whatever. So people don't talk and people don't connect. It's very isolating. Very isolating. (pp. 32-33)

Health Care

The second most frequent subcategory of ethnodramas address health care issues from the perspectives of both recipients and caregivers (though not necessarily within the same play):

• dilemmas of living without health insurance in the U.S. (Saunders, 2008)

• patient interactions with health care providers (Rosenbaum, Ferguson, & Herwaldt, 2005)

• nursing home care (McIntyre, 2009)

• ESL immigrant women's perceptions of health care (Nimmon, 2007)

• cross-cultural health work in Australia (Preisinger, Schroeder, & Scott-Hoy, 2000)

• stroke awareness in South Africa (Stuttaford, Bryanston, Hundt, Connor, Thorogood, & Tollman, 2006)

These ethnodramas, unlike those about cancer, tend to be more "documentary" in tone and construction, though the emotional urgency of participants is still quite vivid. Plays about cancer tend to be case study in nature, whereas ethnodramas about health care are polyphonic collages of mini-monologues—a revue, if you will, of people's perspectives frustrated with a vulnerable and fragile system.

As one example, Saunders (2008) reports on the dilemmas of United States citizens without accessible and affordable health care by first reviewing and contextualizing the statistics before the participants' stories are presented. A narrator tells the audience:

The number of people without health insurance is HUGE—46.6 million . . . . That represents 15.9% of US residents—over one in seven. Let's try to imagine that number. It's greater than the populations of California, Missouri, and Alabama combined (U.S. Census, 2006). It would take over 900 major league baseball stadiums filled to the hilt to fit all of the people without health insurance. If every mile while going cross-country represented an uninsured person, you could travel over 7,000 times from California to New York round trip. (p. 529)

But statistics in a report do not always have to be sweeping in scope. The smaller numbers we deal with on a daily basis can provide points of reference for understanding different situations. Below, a Canadian health care worker relates the costs associated with meals at a nursing home for the elderly as she reflects on her coffee house purchase:

I laugh out loud when I realize that what I've paid—$4.65 with tax, for my grande tazo chai crème, my Saturday after shopping treat—is 16 cents more than our per day resident food budget. Yeah, that's right—three meals a day, with a choice between two entrees at each meal in five different textures: regular, mince, puree, dental soft, and chopped. Plus, snacks with a beverage at 10:00, at 2:00, and before bed at 8:00. Plus, tea and cookies during the night for the wanderers. All that for $4.49 per resident per day. It's gone up 23 cents since 1993. Ten years and an increase in 23 cents per day per person. How much do you figure Starbucks has put up their prices in ten years? (McIntyre, 2009, n.p.)

Aside from the monologic narratives of people's dilemmas with health care, one play by Nimmon (2007) utilizes dialogue to highlight conflicting tensions. Monica is an immigrant still learning the English language and needs medical attention. Note her resiliency to get the help she needs:

(Monica is having an allergic reaction to something and she has red bumps all over her body. She tries calling a health center in Victoria and gets a recorded message on the answering machine.)

MACHINE: (speaking quite fast): You have reached the Victoria Medical Clinic. I am sorry we are not available to take your call. We are open from Monday to Friday from 9 am to 3 pm. If this is an emergency, please contact this number at 351- 5565 where somebody will respond to your call. (Monica dials again because she can't understand the message. Monica is starting to panic. She dials twice more and on the fourth time she finally understands the message. Monica calls the number and speaks with a nurse.)
MONICA: Hi, ummm. . . .
NURSE: Please speak up dear, I can't hear you.
MONICA: Hi, um. . . . ummm. Well, I am really scratchy.
NURSE: Scratchy? What do you mean? You mean itchy?
MONICA: Yes, ummm, itchy. I have little points all over my arm . . . . I mean little dots. They are rad . . . no . . . red.
NURSE: (It is sooo annoying when ESL speakers call here.) Oh, you mean you have a rash. It's called a rash.
MONICA: (This is incredibly embarrassing, I feel like a child.) Yes, a rash. I am sorry. It's so uncomfortable. What should I do? NURSE: You should go and see a doctor.
MONICA: You mean a specialist?
NURSE: Well, you have to go to a general practitioner first. And then you'll get a referral to see a specialist.
MONICA: You mean I can't just go to a specialist on my own? I know what is wrong with me. . . . I need to see a dermatologist. (pp. 389-390)

HIV/AIDS

Ethnodramas in this subcategory tend to assert more socially conscious agendas. The plays range from sympathetic portraits by performance studies scholars, to awareness training by researchers for health care providers:

• HIV/AIDS awareness and people with HIV/AIDS (Corey, 1993)

• HIV-positive women and related stigma (Sandelowski, et al., 2006)

• a chronicle, with music, of a man living with HIV/AIDS (Shapiro & Hunt, 2003)

• a gay man awaiting the death of his partner from AIDS (Dillard, 2000)

One of the most provocative and well-executed ethnodramas in the literature is Margarete Sandelowski, Frank Trimble, Elizabeth K. Woodard, and Julie Barroso's (2006) collaboration to create the DVD production, Maybe Someday: Voices of HIV-Positive Women. Intended as a training documentary for health care providers and social service workers, plus a resonating forum for HIV-positive women themselves, the rigorously researched literature on women with HIV/AIDS was used primarily by Trimble to write and weave informational narrative with reconstructed monologues based on interviews with HIV-positive women. The composite-based resilient characters in the DVD are two African American women, one White woman, and two Latinas. In one scene, a narrator's voice-over prompts the viewer:

Some women struggle with issues beyond their HIV status. These include the extra stigma and discrimination connected with being a woman, being a minority woman, and being a mother. Sometimes women are looked down upon because people make assumptions that their illness is related to drug use, prostitution, promiscuity, poverty, or homelessness. (p. 1363)

Maybe Someday focuses primarily but not exclusively on the themes of stigma associated with HIV status, as this monologue relates:

WOMAN #4 (African American): People talk about minority this and minority that. Well, let me tell you somethin'. You try bein' a Black woman with HIV and see how far you get. See the men, well, they HIV victims. You know, they may face some discrimination, but mostly there's concern and money and support. Then there's the people who caught HIV, you know, because they was doin' somethin' they shouldn't been doin' and got "caught," you know? Yeah, them's mostly minority women, or poor women, or women with too many children, whatever "too many" is. I am sick of that shit! I am physically sick and then I have to handle all that other shit on top of it. It's too much. It's just too much. So what if a HIV person ain't always been good, or maybe is still doin' some of that junk? Sure, a woman needs to change her life if it hurts her and maybe other people, but we have all been hurt by this disease and need to help make things better. But I keep doin' the best I can. Have to. Just have to. Because . . . my children, you know? You don't know me. No one knows me. But my children . . . they know me. And I want to keep it that way. (p. 1364)

Substance Abuse/Addiction

Ethnodramas about abuse and addiction are explicit and raw in their tone and action, with most titles venturing into a surrealistic style with overt "theatrical" devices in their staging. The skewed, nightmarish reality that results from substance abuse and addiction seems to transfer into the script and staging of the issue.2 Resilience in these plays' characters is minimal. Scripts include:

• alcohol and drug abuse, and detoxification (Mienczakowski, 1996, 1997)

• a woman's struggle with her boyfriend's meth addiction (Pust, 2008)

• a young man's battle with alcoholism (Caswell, 2008)

• a family's turmoil from the son's drug abuse (Yang, 2001)

In the monologue excerpt below, female playwright Tifani Pust (2008) unabashedly and graphically describes her relationship with her speed-/meth-addicted male lover in The Demon. Notice the vulnerability and fragility in both characters' psychological states and actions:

we call it "the demon." he is fighting it and doing well now. but i must remain in secret private detective mode and not let my heart fall too quickly. i must check his pupils, and the way he kisses me, his vocabulary changes, and even his energy swings. when the demon is scratching his back, his energy shifts and he becomes a little more reckless, a little more twitchy. i am too naïve to know if these are withdrawal symptoms or craving symptoms. maybe it doesn't matter. maybe it's both. maybe that's the point.

he told me about jail on our "second date," which really wasn't a date as much as it was—our second day together. suddenly i was aware that i was spending time with a convict. not an ex-convict mind you—a convict. i am currently aiding and abetting (literally) a fugitive.

i am falling in love with a felon. a felon and a speed junkie. i am in graduate school and was raised southern baptist. middle class. white. educated. my parents are educated. my parents are educators. i wonder sometimes if we are the last remaining nuclear family. mom, dad, two kids, a dog, and a cat. no picket fence, but the same house for thirty-eight years. thirty eight. i am thirty. he is thirty-three. i am a poet and a dreamer and a writer and i am falling in love with a felon speed junkie who craves it every weekend. ironically, he has no drug charges on his record. misdemeanors, petty theft, brandishing a firearm, which turned out to be a BB gun. he doesn't get arrested when he's high because he's always at home high, alone, or with a girl, naked—fucking. if he's lucky. usually, she wears out and he ends up on the couch, alone, with porn.³ (n.p.)

Additional Ethnodramas about Health and Illness

Length restrictions of this article do not permit me to examine in depth other categories of ethnodramas about health and illness, but the listing below refers readers to the topics addressed in other plays:

Aging and Mental Health

• aging, autonomy, and mental health of older persons (McLean, 2004)

• Alzheimer's disease and dementia (Cole, McIntyre, & McAuliffe, 2001; Kontos & Naglie, 2006; Mitchell, Jonas-Simpson, & Ivonoffski, 2006) Schizophrenia

• attitudes toward schizophrenia (Mienczakowski, Smith, & Morgan, 2002).

• mothers of schizophrenic children (Schneider, 2005) Abortion

• an artist's abortion experience (Minge, 2006)

• a couple experiencing the abortion of their child (Ellis & Bochner, 1992)

Death and Loss⁴

• a woman's reflections on her daughter's birth and mother's death (Pineau, 2000)

• a woman's reflections on the death of her mother and its personal consequences (Spry, 2003)

• an oral historian's grief over the men she interviewed who later died (Case, 2005)

• university students and suicide (Taylor, 2006)

• a visual artist's cultural research and reflections on death (Montano, 2003)

Other

• women's eating disorders (Plourde, 2007)

• an anthropological fieldworker's hallucinogenic bout with malaria (Passes, 2006)

• patients with "unspeakable" illnesses (HIV, breast cancer, etc.) (Kaplan, 2003)

Recommendations

I offer the following personal and subjective recommendations to those interested in writing and producing ethnodramas about health and illness:

First, writers with a theatre background, or health care workers/academic researchers who collaborate with theatre artists, tend to generate higher quality ethnodramas. Both practitioners bring their respective expertise to the project, creating a synergistic product that more effectively balances science and art. I encourage those in health care who wish to use the medium of theatre as a forum for their issues to actively seek and consult with playwrights, stage directors, or drama educators for creative guidance.

Second, I would encourage exploration of the scripted dramatization of some of the field's best qualitative studies in health and illness. In my ethnotheatre course at Arizona State University, students experimented with improvising, as studio exercises, scenes from such works as Michael Angrosino's (1994) "On the Bus with Vonnie Lee," a case study of a developmentally disabled adult. Is there ethnodramatic potential in dramatizing scenes from such books as Denzin's (1993) The Alcoholic Society, or some of the descriptively rich grounded theory studies in illness by sociologist Kathy Charmaz?

Third, I stated in an article of my own autoethnodramatic project (Saldaña, 2008) that you can't learn how to tell someone else's story until you first learn how to tell your own. The reflective practitioner, the autobiographical and autoethnographic examination of one's own career and practice, or even your own history and experiences about health and illness, is rich material for experimental writing of an original monologue or one-act play about your personal stories. In the future, I plan to dramatize the story of my recent and first ambulance ride to a hospital emergency room after a side-effects seizure from a high prescription dose of amitriptyline for my sleep disorder. Metaphorically, the experience was an epiphanic "wake up" call for me to critically examine the work overload in my life.

Closure

When we read or attend ethnodramas about health and illness, what we gain from the event depends on our experiential backgrounds. If we are health care providers, we might learn more about an illness from the patient or client's perspective. If we share the same illness or health issue dramatized on stage, we might find resonance and comfort knowing we are not alone in our suffering because others face the same struggles we do. And if we are neither of these populations, we might come to a greater understanding of those affected by illness and health care matters by perhaps unconsciously acknowledging that the participant's plight could very well be our own some day.

Theatre artists and entertainers are taught several folkloric lessons in how to conclude an evening. Such words of advice include, "Always leave them wanting more," "End a show with 'heart'," "Make them smile as they leave the theatre," and so on. One of the most vital lessons I've learned as both a playwright and audience member is that, regardless of the play's story, subject matter, and themes, end with hope. This is not to suggest that there must always be an artificially applied happy ending, or that we sugarcoat or negate the seriousness of the problems and issues we address. I advocate that we need to write theatrical experiences with the sense that obstacles can be overcome. We need to know that we can endure, despite the odds against us. We need to know that vulnerable and fragile human beings can also be quite resilient, when necessary.

Johnny Saldaña is an Advisory Board member for The International Journal of The Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice IJCAIP. He is a Professor of Theatre in the School of Theatre and Film at Arizona State University where he has taught since 1981. Johnny Saldaña is a playwright, actor, and director of ethnodramatic work, and the author of Longitudinal Qualitative Research: Analyzing Change Through Time (AltaMira Press, 2003), a research methods book and recipient of the 2004 Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association's Ethnography Division; Ethnodrama: An Anthology of Reality Theatre (AltaMira Press, 2005), and The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers (Sage Publications, 2009), a handbook on qualitative data analysis. His forthcoming textbook, Understanding Qualitative Research: The Fundamentals, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2011.

Article originally published, August 2010 Johnny Saldaña , J., Ethnodramas about Health and Illness, Staging Human Vulnerability, Fragility and Resilency, p. 167 – 184 "Creative Arts in Interdisciplinary Practice Inquiries for Hope and Change", Eds. C. McLean, R. Kelly, Detselig Temeron Press, Calgary.

Notes

1. The paper's References include titles that focus on physical and mental health and illness issues, and do not include works that are more social issues-oriented (e.g., domestic violence, natural disaster recovery), though I acknowledge that these too can induce negative physical and mental health consequences. The bibliography included in this paper is not proposed as a comprehensive but a representational one. Ethnodramatic productions tend to be locally produced and not often widely disseminated in print. Also, I have located over 60 related and synonymous terms for ethnodrama/ethnotheatre (e.g., "performance ethnography," "verbatim theatre," "non-fiction playwriting") in the literature across several academic disciplines. This makes online searches of related works and projects difficult to undertake. The author would appreciate any additional references to add to this list from readers who may be acquainted with relevant play scripts and/or productions. Please e-mail any sources with as much bibliographic information as possible to: Johnny.Saldana@asu.edu.

2. For a YouTube clip collage of John Caswell's (2008) autoethnodramatic Shots: A Love Story, access: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5KMIpkd1XZo&feature=channel. Caswell's alcoholic "character" is represented by a chorus of three women, with alcohol itself represented as a street-savvy male. The highly abstract and symbolic dance movement throughout the piece was sometimes juxtaposed with authentic text (e.g., verbatim passages from Alcoholics Anonymous manuals), and demonstrates that performance art can function as a legitimate style of ethnodramatic presentation.

3. The playwright is no longer in this relationship and is living and working in a different part of the country, though there is still communication between she and her former partner who is, at the time of this writing, on probation and in recovery.

4. The large number of ethnodramas about Death and Loss suggests extended discussion in this paper, but I have withheld from this since most of the plays deal with survivorship and personal memoir.

References

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Pineau, E. (2000). Nursing mother and articulating absence. Text and Performance Quarterly 20(1), 1–19.

Plourde, C. (2007). The thin line. Portland, ME: Add Verb Productions touring performance.

Preisinger, M. A., Schroeder, C., & Scott-Hoy, K. (2000, February). What makes me? Stories of motivation, morality and me. Interdisciplinary arts performance at the 2000 American Educational Research Association Arts-Based Research Conference, Albuquerque.

Pust, T. (2008). The demon. Unpublished manuscript.

Rosenbaum, M. E., Ferguson, K. J., & Herwaldt, L. A. (2005). In their own words: Presenting the patient's perspective using research-based theatre. Medical Education 39(6), 622-31.

Saldaña, J. (Ed.). (2005). Ethnodrama: An anthology of reality theatre. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Saldaña, J. (2008). Second chair: An autoethnodrama. Research Studies in Music Education 30(2): 177-191.

Sandelowski, M., Trimble, F., Woodard, E. K., & Barroso, J. (2006). From synthesis to script: Transforming qualitative research findings for use in practice. Qualitative Health Research 16(10), 1350-70.

Saunders, C. M. (2008). Forty seven million strong, weak, wrong, or right: Living without health insurance. Qualitative Inquiry 14(4), 528-45.

Schneider, B. (2005). Mothers talk about their children with schizophrenia: A performance autoethnography. Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing 12(3), 333-340.

Shapiro, J., & Hunt, L. (2003). All the world's a stage: The use of theatrical performance in medical education. Medical Education 37(10), 922-27.

Spry, T. (2003). Illustrated woman: Autoperfomance in "Skins: A daughter's (re)construction of cancer" and "Tattoo stories: A postscript to 'Skins'". In L. C. Miller, J. Taylor, and M. H. Carver (Eds.), Voices made flesh: Performing women's autobiography (pp. 167–91). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Stuttaford, M., Bryanston, C., Hundt, G. L., Connor, M., Thorogood, M., & Tollman, S. (2006). Use of applied theatre in health research dissemination and data validation: A pilot study from South Africa. Health 10(1), 31-45.

Taylor, P. (2006). Beautiful menaced child. Performance at the New York University Forum on Ethnotheatre and Social Justice, New York City.

Yang, Z. (Director). (2001). Quitting [DVD]. United States: Sony Pictures