We recently connected with Suz Gratz and have shared our conversation below.
Suz, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
The biggest risk I have ever taken was choosing to accept myself as I am- a multi-hyphenated theater artist! It is a risk that continues to expand over time and the mission is definitely still a work in progress!
This acceptance project has been brought about by a series of decisions throughout my life that continued to challenge me to heal from the social conditioning of white dominance, the gender binary, and colonizer mindset. All of these legacies I was born into work to shrink diversity into individualism and compulsory binarism. Creative arts, especially theater making, was the catalyst for how I began to take non conforming risks in life, one theater project at a time. Choosing a life in the performing arts is daunting, unpredictable, and ambiguous – which offered (and continuously offers) a supportive space for my hurt, grief, uncertainties, mistakes, and queer non-binary selves to thrive. Being an interdisciplinary artist is an existence that by nature refuses distillation and instead encourages multiplicity of self. In my career, there is room for all of me, especially the parts I am working to unlearn that cause harm. Even with all the challenges resistance brings, I wouldn’t have it any other way! Theater practices have brought me to ancestral healing, queer joy, anti-racism work, disability justice, and learning to be free and to always be working to free others. For me, this is aligning with my place in the ecosystem and hopefully helps bring about the systemic transformation we need.
My choice to follow my creative spirit as a multi-passionate synthesizer, has transformed into not only a career as a Registered Drama Therapist and small business owner, but also a way of living as my unapologetic queer self! It has helped me forge a path that interweaves social justice, art, healing, and community. Following my acting passion led me ultimately to the study and practice of drama therapy. Working as a Registered Drama Therapist (NADTA, WADTH), is to be a practitioner who believes that health and wellbeing lives in identifying and nurturing the diversity of life roles inside of us. Drama Therapists across the globe utilize clinical study and a variety of dramatic ritual, theater based practices, and creative expression to support individuals and communities towards therapeutic growth, change, and justice.
Drama Therapy is a practice of inclusion by design, not one of exclusion and reduction. An assumption of Drama Therapists is that there is no one way of being. Drama Therapists have an orientation that there are many ways and many selves that contribute to holism, and it is our ability to know and move with these many parts that contributes to healing. What I endeavor to do through my drama therapy practice with clients, is to help folx experience the inherent ambiguity and fluidity of being human, with greater acceptance and joy. In the world of creative arts therapy, clients are invited to become curious, brave, and radically compassionate with every aspect of being alive- even the grief stricken and challenging shadow parts of self. My hope and intention is this creates a collaborative space where all selves, not only the roles that society rewards, encourages, or engenders as “non-pathological”, are welcomed.
Suz, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Currently I have a Oakland based business as a Registered Drama Therapist and coach in private practice. I offer sessions to individuals, partners, and groups both in person and virtually. I operate from a home office and also a commercial space shared with a lovely suite mate near Lake Merritt. I have a bachelor’s degree from California State University of Long Beach where I studied Acting Performance before going on to receive a Masters from New York University in Drama Therapy. In between those two credentials, I jostled all sorts of jobs from acting gigs, food service, fitness instruction, nannying, brand ambassadoring, recruiting support, and all the hats a 20 something can wear in NYC. Through my graduate internships and beyond I have gained experience working as a drama therapist in non-profit settings for adults, acute psychiatric hospital settings (adult and adolescent), as well as residential treatment for youth experiencing trauma, mood, & co-occurring substance and eating disorders. In all these settings I offered 1:1 and group intervention through use of theater based practices including movement, role play, improvisation, creative writing, scene crafting, ancestral dramatization, and metaphor exploration.
From a young age I was filled with so many difficult feelings and a deep loneliness. I found myself struggling with mental health constantly and looking for a place to belong. I had no language for traumas I had been through or understanding of therapy until my 20s and later on studying trauma informed yoga and then Drama Therapy at NYU. Until then, my experiences of mental health challenges found moments of self acceptance and dismantled shame in the surplus reality (Joseph Moreno) of the theater. This was a world created by a community of artists choosing together to free themselves of the usual rules and constraints, all within the safe containment of the stage. The most healing part was the witnessing, the energy of a captive audience who would finally see me in a new way.
If you have known the world of theater than you know this warm and absurd family system full of quirky ones and queers, who gaze at you with an invitation of self love and a celebration of uniqueness. Theater was my first truly secure attachment. An attuned, present, and emotionally available community figure to bring all my troubles to, my strangeness, my gifts, my questions. Everything I brought to the actor’s space, albeit a wildly imperfect and flawed place, met me with curiosity rather than judgment. These experiences countered the pain of life’s outside structures with rules, gender norms, expectations, and rejections. If you made a mistake, there’s always another run through, tomorrow night’s performance, another version of the scene with a new character choice. It feels important to note that while theater and the industry offer a collaborative space to many folks, there is much work to be done to dismantle racism, fatphobia, ableism, transphobia and many other areas of social justice in the industry. While I don’t do much in a commercial sense any longer in theater, I truly believe it could be supported by a more trauma informed collective care web. I hope to see a more transformative justice approach to theater making. Something drama therapists offer is a space for identity accountability building, a way to find self/community analysis of relationships to power and privilege. I hope for the influence of drama therapists in the industry to continue influencing leading theater companies to deconstruct how hoarded space and wealth in the field has long fed on the shame and oppression of QTBIPOC disabled artists.
Now with all my understanding of trauma (an event or series of events that overwhelm the humans adaptive responses to stress), I recognize that through being an actor I was supporting my nervous system to find regulation as we rehearsed the emotional life of characters. I was discovering mental reframes, debunking cognitive distortions, and physically healing the trauma in my cells through psycho-physical movement. Repetition, containment, self-soothing, venting, vocalizing, titration, inhabiting a character- this is all trauma work. Many of these tools inform the techniques I use with clients in sessions. Today as a drama therapist, I utilize a variety of trauma informed concepts that are a blend of theater based rituals, somatic (embodiment) training, and coaching to hopefully foster an experience for clients in which they can inhabit new healing roles in their life. Trauma attacks our ability to sense, feel, imagine, play, and connect on psychobiological levels. It sabotauges our ability to feel self, community, land, spirit, and ancestors. Drama therapy centers all of these aspects at the heart of healing, to lead clients in a multi-dimensional process to trauma healing.
Primarily working with queer, trans, and neuroqueer (Nick Waker) creatives, many people I support experience the impacts of oppressive structures that heap shame upon their identities. They arrive role exhausted, role stigmatized, role shamed, role locked, and role burnt out. I work with clients to develop body awareness and agency. Unpacking our system of roles and building an understanding of behavior, emotion, somatic experience, thoughts, and the relationship to social systems that make up the “scenes” of life, gives us the empowerment of choices. My main intention with clients is to reduce isolation and increase connection. Through reprocessing of trauma in a gradual and well paced manner, clients begin to see their autonomy, choice, and feel an ability to connect to the life affirming things they care about-even through oppression, duress ,and change. The inner critic can meet the compassionate lover. The ashamed queer can find the chosen family. The hero goes on a journey and arrives somewhere new. When I meet clients, I tailor interventions to meet their goals. Common struggles clients work through are related to homophobia and transphobia, body image, isolation, anxiety, depression, dysfunctional family systems, abuse, relational repair, and understanding attachment wounds.
In my acting experiences I got to play roles that said NO! I played villains, sidekicks, inanimate objects- I even reversed places with a guinea pig once in a staged version of Fleabag (Phoebe Waller-Bridge). Those few hours at a time where I trained to do this, to step into a role, inhabit another organism, a body’s gesture, posture, gait, self beliefs, and journey, gave me something indispensable- the power of choice. My experiences of a “stuck” life, even for a few hours, wasn’t as stuck anymore when I then brought the sustained embodiment of a role, back to my daily life self. A little bit of that energy remained with me. And a little bit over time, becomes a lot of a bit. Theater artists often are asked to forgo a safe life and choose a fully alive and richly expressed one. I think we can be safe enough and fully expressed, when given the chance.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
Mutual aid and community care webs. I am standing on the shoulders of so many generous mentors, friends, partners, peers, and community members within the creative arts therapist community to be able to sustain this business. Peer consult groups where we gather and support one another, online forums where folks offer advice and wisdom, discounted supplies and recycled materials, and long chats with friends on the phone saying “you are doing your best”. We often share spaces with one another, swap tips and best practices, and show up for one another. Rich relational landscapes are key.
Hows folks can generally support artist movements is by paying attention to voices that often aren’t heard. This is not because they are not deeply important, but because they are systemically gate kept from mainstream ticket sales and spaces. I recently saw a Trans Super Hero Rock Opera, “The Red Shades” at Z Space in SF that changed my life. I bought a ticket in exchange for a story of resilience and representation of chosen family that I will have in my heart forever. I got to see more Trans bodies joyfully expressing on stage than I have ever seen before, outside of a drag show. This is the reciprocity of taking care of one another in a world that increasingly and violently attempts to silence QTBIPOC artists.
I couldn’t be where I am without feeling a sense of safety to reach out to the community and say I need help. I’ve been met with so many folks who were willing to meet me for coffee, lend me a spreadsheet, walk me through my taxes, you name it! When I get to do this for others, energetically funding their expansion as an artist, there is nothing more thriving than that mutuality. I wish for more people to get in touch with their vulnerability and appreciation of the arts. Our earth is in trouble and I think creative communities may give humans a fighting chance to be foster the ingenuity and resilience we need!
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
A mix of Drama Therapy, Theater Practice, Somatic Influences, Queer Theory, & Disability Justice. These voices and practices have supported me in listening to my inner truth and helped inform my business intentions and formation from an embodiment of liberation.
Pleasure Activism- Adrienne Marie Brown
The Body is Not an Apology- Sonya Rene Taylor
Speaker and Poet Alok Vaid-Menon https://www.alokvmenon.com/
Taya Ma- Jewish Ancestral Healing Podcast
Reesma Menekeem- My Grandmother’s Hand’s and practices of Somatic Abolitionism
Alchemystic Studio – desi voices of yoga philosophy & decolonizing yoga https://www.instagram.com/alchemystic_studio/?hl=en
Dustin Maxwell – Somatic Death Cafe – https://www.dustinmaxwell.org/
Danielle Levanas, Drama Therapist and Relationship Coach- https://daniellelevanas.com/
Staci Haines- “The Politics of Trauma”
Leah Lakshmi – https://brownstargirl.org/
Michale Chekhov psycho physical theater teachings
NYU Professors and their scholarship within Drama Therapy – Nisha Sajnani, Maria Hodermarska, Britton Williams
Contact Info:
- Website: www.suzannahgratzdramatherapist.com
- Instagram: suzannahgratz_dramatherapist
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SuzannahGratzRDT/
Image Credits
https://brownguydesign.com/