Bernie has been acquainted with me since 1987 as a professional colleague and friend. He has worked for nearly 30 years as a Drama and Dance Specialist in the field of Education. He has also worked professionally as an actor, director, choreographer, and dancer with various Theatre and Dance companies in the United Kingdom and Canada. Mostly, his work has been associated with "Theatre for Change", "Theatre for Young Audiences", "Theatre in Education" and "Drama-in-Education" but he has also worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company in Shakespearean Drama. His work as a multi-disciplinary specialist in Educational, Institutional and Community settings has taken him around the world.

Bernie holds a Ph.D. and his current position is Professor of Dramatic Art, with the Department of Dramatic Art at the University of Windsor, in Ontario. His most recent research project is taking him to France to investigate the therapeutic uses of Clown techniques in specific, psychiatric, special needs environments.

Bert Amies, who was his first mentor that Bernie assisted for a number of years in the United Kingdom motivated him in his work in Drama-in-Education as well as Drama as a Therapeutic Medium. He also supplemented his knowledge of these fields from certain books. While attending University he created his own 'minor' in Educational/Therapeutic Drama before such a course of study really existed.

Over the years, he has participated either in Drama and its therapeutic applications workshops with Keith Yon, Veronica Sherbourne, Sue Jennings, Joel Badaines, Roy Shuttleworth, Gordi Wiseman and other experts in this field. Bernie’s earliest influences were Bert Amies and Keith Yon. He was also influenced by Veronica Sherbourne, and Walli Meier, dance and movement therapists who were students of Rudolf Laban, and his colleague Rob Watling, an expert on Action Research at the University of Leicester. .

For Bernie, Blatner's Acting In has been a useful text as well as Sue Jenning’s Remedial Drama, but in both cases they simply re-enforced his way of working. As he progressed, his Martial Arts training has influenced his work more and more as well as the work of Roberta Nadeau and George Mager but most especially those men and women he worked for and with.

In addition to the above, each of the following persons he has met or worked with, in their unique ways have changed the direction of his work: Matsuro Otani, who was his first Martial Arts instructor had impact on his philosophy of Holism. Bert Amies, Keith Yon, influenced Bernie’s theory of the significance of breath and focusing. Fred Keating, brought Psychodrama workshops to Canada. Peter Senior, is a pioneer in the Arts for Health, Movement , and Interlink. Richard Courtney, was his intellectual mentor who provided the sounding board for his theories and influenced his own thoughts. He was, for Bernie the intellectual link between things, and sometimes disputed some of the things Bernie wrote. "He worked his own form of magic to support even his greatest distracters and detractors."

And George Mager, from McGill University made him reconsider his philosophy about the quality of Art and its production values. .George Hu, worked with him in the Martial Arts. David Reilly is both a medical and a homeopathic doctor who runs the Glasgow Homeopathic Hospital. He is a leader in research in these areas, informing Bernie about alternative and complimentary methods to medical practices, and he is an aficionado of the Arts. Lastly, Caroline Simonds, Bernie’s co-author of his most current research, is the Directrice of Le Rire Medecin, a company of professional "clown doctors" who work in hospitals in France. He thinks that her work is "mind-blowing".

Bernie’s philosophy regarding Drama-in-Education is "that there is no one way of being or doing. We are all unique individuals. Everyone has the right to make his own creative mark irrespective of ability or disability. The Arts cannot be done to others." Consequently, Bernie does not teach or heal but rather shares a Taoist perspective to engage another in a "dance towards wholeness" whether that is an educational or a therapeutic 'dance'. He attempts to enable the client/patient/student) to take responsibility for his own well being and learning.

As Therapy then, Bernie sees Drama as a preventative tool for wellness. There is a notion in Chinese medical practice that the practitioner is only paid when the patient is well. "My way of working is to give sick people the tools to help them get better, and if they are not sick, to help them keep well; if they have been sick to enable them to maintain their current state of wellness. Therefore, Dramatherapy seeks to make someone like himself, redundant!

Drama, is therefore, a therapeutic mode, in Bernie’s definition, only in the sense that it is "context-driven, and practitioner-driven, depending on who is using it, where, with whom and why." In that way, he believes that all Drama Structures (techniques, methods, forms and modes) are the same.

Bernie has rarely considered anything that he does to be Therapy. "The notion of therapy, especially in the Arts, is often defined by the observer." However, he knows that others have labeled his work that way, "so he has simply accepted the label for the work that he has done (influenced by many of his Taoist Masters/Teachers and Freud) much of the time." He thinks that most people consider a lot of his work to be Dramatherapy in the broadest definition of the term.

Bernie believes that Theatre can be ‘toxic’ as well as helpful. Theatre toxicity is a term that he and George Major coined when they were working together.

It describes people who want to be in Drama because they believe or somebody has told them that it’s good for them but actually it does them no good at all and it even makes them worse. I’ve come across two or three people who that has happened to. I’ve had at least a couple of examples of people who really wanted to be on stage and it’s the worst thing that ever happened to them. It’s made them awful. In one case, he had to be put on medication. Forcing a shy or disabled person to participate in a Dramatic mode can cause depression.

Stage fright is one example of the effect, but it isn’t just a case of stage fright. It can happen with people who really want to be on stage. ‘It exacerbates their depression. They really want to be on stage but it’s the worse thing they can do, and in fact the way we get around that is putting them backstage and then they start to feel better because they are still doing Theatre but they aren’t onstage.

Bernie accepts the view that Drama can be beneficial. "I can accept all points of view, but that doesn’t mean that I can buy into them."

He validated that he has read mostly everything written up until 1992, in the Field of Dramatherapy including David Read Johnson, Emunah, Mitchell, Jennings, Blatner, etc. Their biggest influence, for him, was to make him question the meaning of Dramatherapy, and specifically what makes it different from Developmental Drama or Drama-in-Education. He feels that Richard Courtney, Bert Amies, Peter Slade, and Brian Way, who were pioneers of Developmental Drama-in-Education, in his belief, were far more beneficial to their students than many of today’s Dramatherapists. "Labels do not change the intrinsic essence of the activity or the interaction."

For some authors this seems to be defined by the context i.e. working in a hospital, while, for others, by the population i.e. working with schizophrenics. For still others, it seems to be defined by the goal, with the exception of some cases of the last example (i.e. when the goal is a specifically designed course of treatment to bring a specific symptom relief). But, none of these are truly Therapy in the strictest sense of the word.

He explained that "therapy is a clinical term, which means ‘a specifically designed course of treatment to bring about a specific symptom relief’. It’s been interpreted in different ways to meet psychology." He feels that everybody interprets Therapy to mean, "if you feel better or if you feel good, then that’s Therapy. It may be therapeutic; it may be beneficial but it isn’t therapy in the clinical sense. I gather from my medical colleagues that if something is Therapy, it has to be able to be repeatable with control groups in a blind test. It’s got to deal with the gold standard, which is the medical term for a double-blind placebo study. You can’t do that with the Arts nor, would you want to."

So, Bernie almost never uses the language of Therapy, Psychology or Psychotherapy in his teaching; however, he said that he "does describe certain words or terms so that if students come across them, they are aware of their meanings (such as A.D.D., attunement, attachment, displacement reactions, etc.)."

He has used techniques that are also used by Psychologists, Psychotherapists, and Dramatherapists. He is not sure if any of them can lay claim to these techniques. For example, the "empty chair " attributed to Moreno was first used by Stanislavski; the "guided imagery" used very effectively by in such areas as cancer by Simonton, etc. has been used for thousands of years by Taoists in training priests or internal Martial Artists.

The strict medical/clinical definition for Dramatherapy, "a prescribed course of treatment designed to produce prescribed results, is a flawed one in his opinion.

For about ten years, top researchers like Dr. David Reilly (Glasgow University Medical School), Dr. David Eisenberg (Harvard Medical School), and Dr. James Gordon (Georgetown Medical School) have pointed out the weakness in the former definition. To Bernie, Therapists and Arts Therapists are generally, lazy in the articulation and description of their work .

He is increasingly accepting of the work of people like the three medical doctors mentioned above coupled with Taoism and Eastern teachings. The main reason, "is they are more honest in their way at looking at transformation, which is a ‘double balance of energies’. We have been very arrogant in the West in the last fifty years and the Arts Therapists have, by and large, tried to buy into this arrogant "top down" approach."

To Bernie, there is no best form of Drama that has the most benefit for therapeutic results. "When you seek it, you cannot find it." Therefore, he has seen extreme responses to his teaching approach. Some critics have suggested that he "just plays games" or "his work is very simple but powerful."

Bernie feels that there is little difference between Dramatherapy and Developmental Drama-in-Education. "You could think about Drama being therapeutic or beneficial in this context as long as you didn’t try to suggest it produced cause and effect responses." To talk about the therapeutic benefits, he believes, is reasonable but,

Most Dramatherapists are not suitably qualified to defend it as a medical or scientific medium. I think people use language without being aware of what they mean. People use terms extremely sloppily. If you’re going to talk about self-esteem or body image you better bloody well define what you mean before you talk about them, because they’re such ‘basket terms’. If you’re going to talk about Dramatherapy or Drama as Therapy, or talk about it in a clinical sense you better be careful about what symptoms you mean to alleviate and how you plan to do it and how you are going to prove this happened. I mean most of the research that’s been done about this has been appalling.

Why would the empty chair exercise be a Therapeutic technique rather than a Drama technique? "I mean I think you can use the same method or technique if it’s in context. You know Neelands can use it, so can Jonathan Fox, so can Augusto Boal. They all use it. Boal’s, Forum Theatre, Jonathan Fox’s Playback Theatre, and Jonathan Neeland’s Drama Structures." For example, Neeland uses ‘thought tracking’ which is Neeland’s term for ‘the auxiliary ego’.

Bernie’s contribution to my thesis was the only one that examined Dramatherapy in terms of Eastern philosophy.

In Eastern philosophy, there is a notion of ‘double balance’. The practitioner has to balance his or her own energies in the ‘dance towards wellness’ so it’s more than a double balance; it’s a double balance in context. The practitioner is trying to balance the patient’s energies in context with the environment and their own in context with the patient. With the patient there is an alignment; there are two sets of energies: the energy of the patient and the energy of the practitioner. And both have to be balanced in themselves and in the environment where the dance takes place.

I was interested in his research on ‘clown work’ in hospitals for this study. He said that he was "only at the gathering of information stage but it would eventually involve the study of the effects of having clowns working in hospitals and even on cancer wards." Bernie’s insights from his experiences with the clinical dimension of Dramatherapy, his movement towards Eastern philosophy in his work, and the links he makes between Dramatherapy and Developmental Drama are connect significantly to my thesis.