On this episode of Power to Be Happy, I’m joined by the extraordinary Blayne Welsh—a First Nations scholar, theatre maker, and a true visionary in the intersection of healing, performance, and indigeneity.

Blayne shares his deeply personal journey of healing through theater, exploring how movement, ritual, and storytelling can transform pain into power. We dive into the concept of liminal spaces, the role of performance in reconnecting with our humanity, and how indigenous practices offer profound lessons for healing and community.

Whether you’re curious about drama therapy, looking for new ways to reconnect with yourself, or simply want to be inspired by Blayne’s wisdom, this episode is for you.

Tune in to discover how theatre can be a tool for recovery, transformation, and belonging—and how we can all create rituals and spaces that heal.

This is a conversation about courage, creativity, and the power of storytelling to harmonize our relationships with the world around us. Don’t miss it!!

Full Podcast Transcript

Joe:

Today, I am beyond excited to be joined by Blayne Welsh—a First Nations scholar, theatre maker, and just an all-around extraordinary human being.

Blayne’s work dives deep into the intersection of theatre, performance, and healing. And I just know this conversation is going to be incredibly special.

Blayne, we first connected after I read your research on the power of ritual in theatre, and I was so inspired by your insights and your approach to storytelling, performance, and healing.

So, Blayne, it’s an honour to have you here today to talk about healing and recovery through the lens of theatre, performance, and indigeneity. I think it’s going to be incredibly special.

Blayne, welcome to the show!

Blayne:

Joe:

Blayne:

When I found theatre, I was in a space where I needed healing, and it just so happened that theatre gave it to me. That’s when I began the journey of realizing, ‘This is useful—not just for me, but potentially for the mob.’

For me, it was about the performance element. Being able to move your body, to move through a space, to create a simulated world where you know the rules and you’re in control—it’s incredibly powerful.

By creating that environment and diving into what it means to be human, I found it helps regulate emotions. But it’s not just that. Theatre expands beyond the boundaries we’ve placed on it in modern society.”

In Australia, we often think of theatre as something confined to black boxes or big productions like Les Misérables. But historically, theatre and performance practices were vital social and healing functions within cultures.

For me, there’s a deep connection to my indigenous ancestors. My dad was taken, so I’ve been on a lifelong journey of returning home.

When I look back at our cultures and ancestors—the way we moved as animals moved, the way we gathered, danced, and performed—it’s clear these practices were essential for healing and regulation.

We’ve removed many of these performative elements from our society, boxed them into museums or theatres, and lost their broader social function. But these practices are still so valuable.

Blayne:

Even though it might seem superficial at first glance, you can see how this ritual helped release potential social tensions. It served a vital function in maintaining harmony within the community.

For me, theatre became a way to reconnect with these kinds of performative practices from my ancestors. It was healing—not just emotionally, but also culturally.

Theatre gave me a framework to express myself. And as someone with borderline personality and complex PTSD, it became a tool for regulation and healing.

It also allowed me to embody the practices of my ancestors in a way that felt relevant to my identity in today’s world.

Joe:

When I think about exploring theatre as part of my personal healing journey, it’s that energy—whether you’re a performer, an audience member, or someone watching a performance—that sparks or contributes to the healing process.

What does that energy bring up for you, in terms of creating it and being part of it?

Blayne:

In that space, a couple of things happen. First, it becomes safe—safe to try things, safe to feel things. If you experience a depth of emotion in a play that you might feel outside the theatre, it’s different because, in the theatre, you can go through it while maintaining the comfort of knowing, ‘This isn’t real.’ That’s the suspension of disbelief.

It’s all about the space we enter into. Even Plato talked about the spirit that exists between the audience and the performer. I’ve been thinking about spirit as the effective, liminal space between beings.

For example, between me and you, Joe, if I think of you, I have a certain image and emotional affect that comes to me. That’s your spirit—not something tangible, but how I reflect it.

Creating that safety and that space is essential. But there’s also work to be done in that space. That’s where directors, shamans, tricksters, clever fellows, and early priests all occupy a similar role.

We’re somewhat outside society in our own way, but we’re in control of these liminal spaces. We have the authority—whether cultural, spiritual, or artistic—to guide a group of human beings through a series of seemingly disconnected exercises. Ultimately, it’s about taking them on an effective journey toward preparation for a ceremony.

For a director, that ceremony might be opening night. For a priest or rabbi, it might be confirmation or a bar mitzvah. And for a drama therapist, it’s about guiding the client through a process so they leave the other side a little healthier and better equipped to manage their relationship with the world around them.

Fundamentally, we’re all doing the same thing—we just have different ‘whys’ behind it.

Joe:

If someone’s never thought of theater or drama therapy as a space or tool for healing, what would you say to them? How can someone begin to explore theater or drama therapy as part of their healing?

Blayne:

What theatre enables us to do is work with the emotional and affective spaces in a direct, embodied way. I’d argue it’s sometimes more effective than trying to cognitively induce those emotional spaces. Both approaches work—it’s just different horses for different courses.

As for drama therapy, there’s a range of different types depending on who you are, what you do, and what your comfort level is.

The first thing I’d say is to break the idea of theatre and drama away from the box we naturally place it in as Australians. Sure, there are elements of traditional theatre in there, but it’s so much more.

Take something like ‘One Two Punch,’ which you’re fond of, Joe. It’s a form of performance therapy. You’re not training to be a boxer or preparing to defend yourself in a fight. The purpose is performative—it’s about creating a physical response.

When I first told my doctor I had depression, he said, ‘Just go and exercise more.’ Thanks, doc. But even that is a kind of performance. What if I don’t like exercising?

Theatre as a drama therapy method gets you off your backside and moving around. It might involve doing some weird things in spaces you’re not comfortable with. We all have this ‘social cling wrap’ that restricts our movements and behaviours.

For example, if you asked someone to walk into a crowded space and act silly, they wouldn’t do it. But in a safe space, once you start moving and let that cling wrap break free, you discover new ranges of movement—new ways of being.

There’s a physical element to it, but there’s also a deeply emotional and affective element. And it’s fun! It might feel weird or strange at first, but once you’re in it, it’s enjoyable.

Drama therapy is often done in groups, which I find personally beneficial. Being around others who’ve been on similar journeys creates a sense of support and connection.

At its core, it’s a physical, embodied, and simulational practice. For example, someone on the spectrum might study people’s performances to replicate them. Through rehearsal, they can engage in the performance that most neurotypical people would call ‘the way things are done.’

Resimulating environments and spaces can be tremendously powerful. The type of drama therapy depends on the method. Some lean into storytelling and character work—like archetypes and the hero’s journey. Others are more improvisational, constantly changing to help people deal with the complexities of life.

If you’re someone who wants to sit down and talk about your problems, that’s fine. But if you’re someone who says, ‘I want to have a go at it—maybe do some training and rehearsal,’ then drama therapy could be an avenue for you to explore.

Joe:

Blayne:

Joe:

Blayne:

Joe:

I really love that, Blayne—it speaks to me deeply. But I also want to go back to something you’ve done recently. You ran a workshop on making totems and deep listening, where participants were creating personal totems. Can you share what a totem represents in the context of healing and why creating one can be such a meaningful experience?

Blayne:

Totems, obviously, are something that pop up in cultures all over the world. Recently, I’ve been told they’re even a big thing in gaming. But for my ancestors, we had what was called ‘Dian,’ which is our meat family—our kinship group—and it was based around animal totems.

For example, my great-uncle was the emu totem. My uncle and grandmother were the black duck. What that did was form your group because you effectively became family with that animal. I’ve claimed the magpie, which took me twenty-five years to finally do.

What that means is simple: it’s an animal you don’t eat. It’s a cultural practice that helped us maintain sustainability because we’re literally brothers and sisters to these animals. It helps heal the land and the human-nonhuman relationship.

Totems also speak to archetypes. For example, the crow is a trickster. And we love archetypes, don’t we? Everyone’s always saying, ‘Oh, I’m an INFP,’ or ‘I’m such a Taurus.’ We look for that association with the physical world—a reflection of ourselves in it.

For us, totems were and still are a deep cultural practice. Many other mobs have similar practices—you’ve probably heard of spirit walking or meeting your spirit guide. When you need to heal or transition in life, which often involves entering a liminal space, that’s where the idea of connecting with a totem or spirit guide comes in.

The way I use totems in workshops is through puppetry. I have to thank the creator for Tamaru’s The Puppeteer and the great people at Polyglot for introducing me to making. That’s when I realized my practice was missing something.

Embodied performance is powerful, but the problem is that the focus is always on you. When you’re making something, the focus shifts outside of you. This is what we call ‘distancing.’

Distancing is crucial in therapy because it creates space between the vulnerable self and the thing you want to work with. That’s why arts therapy, including drama therapy, is so effective. Creating an artifact outside yourself gives you that distance.

The purpose of the totems workshop, though, is to teach deep listening. And part of teaching deep listening is getting people to think critically about how they actually listen.

I’m not talking about performative listening—like nodding, saying, ‘Oh, yeah, I’m paying attention,’ or pretending you care. That’s not real listening.

For me, deep listening is about getting out of your own way and out of your own head. I learned this early on, sitting with uncles and aunties in my late teens.

To teach this to my artists and ensembles, I create an environment where they’re told something they’re intimately familiar with but might disagree with—or even find wrong. That tension is important.

So, what do I do? I get participants to create a sacred totem—always an animal they care about. But here’s the rule, Joe: what can’t they do? They can’t tell anyone why.

Joe:

Blayne:

When you get to the fun part of the activity I set up—and I won’t go into detail—you’re now listening to someone tell you about this little paper animal they’ve created. And what happens is, you might be directly affected in a significant way, but it’s through this distanced thing. It’s not a direct personal affront or connection.

For example, if I did the same activity and said, ‘I want you to tell the other person what their outfit says about them,’ I wouldn’t do that. Why? Because I need to be wary of the pathways things can go. That’s someone’s personal choice. If you’ve got someone who very specifically and deliberately wears certain artifacts or items to communicate something deep about their identity, and someone comes in and messes that up, that’s on the facilitator.

But with the totem, it creates this safe little animal that becomes the artifact of what we’re talking about. It gives you a safe way of noticing things like, ‘Oh no, I keep wanting to jump in,’ or, ‘Oh my gosh, I wanted to tell them something, but by the time I stopped thinking about it, they’d already gone three sentences ahead, and I missed part of what they said.’

It’s about having that critical thought and reflection. That’s the purpose of creating the totem for this work.

More broadly, totems have been used in different cultures for different reasons, but they’re generally about healing and harmonizing relationships. And I think that’s a nicer way to think about it than just ‘healing trauma.’ It’s about harmonizing your relationships with the world around you.

Joe:

It’s the same thing, at least in my experience. I remember creating a totem—a kookaburra—and it just felt right. It was like some kind of expression of something within me. Allowing yourself to channel something that comes through you becomes a process of trusting yourself again, doesn’t it?

Blayne:

Now, the spiritual element of this might put some people off, but my thoughts are pretty grounded in materialism. I think of the subconscious as our deep thinking—it’s tremendously powerful.

Think about it: your subconscious can generate an entire world for you to fly through while you’re asleep, and you simultaneously experience it. It’s a massively powerful network system. Our sovereign thinking—our conscious mind—is just the surface of it.

But how often do we acknowledge it? Because it’s functionally a different thinking system. And as we know, if we have trauma, PTSD, or some form of neurodiversity, our subconscious is incredibly powerful at making us do what it thinks we need to do to stay safe.

For example, if you’ve ever dealt with addiction, you know how real that is. Your subconscious is sending you signals like, ‘You need it. You need it. You need it.’ And when that goes away, it’s amazing.

This process—creating a totem, free writing, generating a character, or engaging in creative practice—is like having a dialogue with your deep thinking. It’s saying to your subconscious, ‘Alright, I need you. This is what you’re for. Come and help me.’

When you spend enough time talking with your deep thinking about a character, for example, suddenly your subconscious finds the character and says, ‘Here it is.’ And it might come with a whole set of nuances and relationships that you couldn’t consciously plan.

Creative people rely on their subconscious all the time. But this isn’t just about creativity. Indigenous cultures all over the world—and even modern cultures rooted in indigenous practices—have systems for this.

For example, in East Asia, there’s a business practice where, if you’re confronted with a problem or challenge, you don’t respond immediately. You notice it, but you let it percolate.

Think about Archimedes discovering buoyancy. He wasn’t drawing circles in the sand—he was in the bath. His subconscious had been processing all those relationships he’d been obsessing about, and when his body felt the water, it all clicked. That’s deep thinking doing its work.

We don’t give our subconscious enough credit because we’re so focused on our sovereign thinking—‘I’m Blayne. I’m me. I’m I.’ But if you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve had to handle potentially violent or dangerous situations, it becomes clear how powerful our deep thinking is.

It’s linked to performativity for me because personality disorders often manifest as a constant need to perform a role around others. I’ve never really felt within my own identity, so it’s natural for me to see everything as performance.

Joe:

Blayne:

There’s this shared, shame-based, almost unique version of BPD that I’ve read about in articles. It’s something seen in young Indigenous men like me, who are descendants of institutionalised men—or who were institutionalised ourselves, given the circumstances. That carries through.

But also, you know, I understand growing up with biracial parents in the 1980s… Yeah, we all have it. And one thing my therapist—shoutout to Mary, a First Nations therapist—helped me connect to is this idea that the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, was written with a specific intent.

The original intent was for insurance companies. That’s why I suffer from complex PTSD and not something like ‘childhood PTSD.’ Because if they called it childhood PTSD, well, pretty much everyone would have a case that their parents messed them up in some way. Right?

At the end of the day, our parents were twenty-something-year-old beings who weren’t even fully developed adults themselves, trying to manage life in a new world without any ritual or community support. That’s something we don’t have in the West.

In our mob’s old way, for example, when my dad went back home for the first time, he lived with three or four different women before he finally worked out who his mum was. Because that role—the role of raising a child—is a shared role. It’s a communal experience, even while we’re individuals.

But for our parents, they were stuck being individuals, taking care of kids on their own. And so, instead of calling it ‘childhood PTSD,’ it’s labelled as ‘complex PTSD.’ That’s just the reality.

And this ties back to performance too. The thing is, you’re teaching your children the performance of their identity just by doing it.

Imagine this: two men are driving in two separate cars. Behind them, red and blue lights start flashing—it’s the police. They’re being pulled over.

Let’s say one man is white, and the other is black. The white man gets pulled over, looks back, swears, probably thinks, ‘This is stupid. I’m going to be late.’ He pulls over, annoyed, but that’s it.

Now, let’s say the black man gets pulled over. He suddenly tenses up, grips the wheel tightly, makes sure his hands are at ten and two, sits up straight, gets quiet. His entire body language changes. He has a completely different, natural, performative response to being pulled over by the police.

Now imagine each of those men has their son in the backseat, watching the whole thing unfold. Those kids are learning the performance they’re expected to do in that situation.

For the white man’s son, the lesson might be, ‘You can be annoyed, make a joke, it’s no big deal.’ For the black man’s son, the lesson might be, ‘This is how you survive this situation. This is how you perform to stay safe.’

Thankfully, I’ve dodged that particular experience because I present as white. I haven’t had to deal with that. But that’s a whole other layer of performance that’s actively happening for a human in that space.

And the thing is, we’re not even aware of it most of the time because we’ve rehearsed it so often. It just becomes the way things are.

Joe:

Blayne, if someone wanted to create their own totem or even a ritual to support their healing process, where would you suggest they start? Are there any guiding principles they should keep in mind?

Blayne:

How do you discover your own ritual? I won’t touch too much on totems because I think people can easily understand totems. For example, you might have a rock you found when you were five years old that holds meaning for you, and you’ve kept it ever since.

But ritual—that’s something everyone can create, though there are certain traps we fall into in the West when it comes to creating rituals. You see this on display if you go to, say, a new-age ritual. There are a lot of elements that make up a ritual, and I often refer to a guide from Richard Schechner, whose field of performance studies is all about viewing everything as a performance.

One of the key elements he talks about is downplaying virtuosity. If you’re creating a ritual for your healing, it can’t be about you in the performance. Think about a solemn priest giving a eulogy—they’re not up there to show off their public speaking skills or how well they can articulate. It’s not about them. It’s about the task, the effect, the purpose of the utterance and the performance.

This is where we differentiate between performance for entertainment and performance for efficacy or effect. Ritual falls into the latter category. It’s about creating a sequence that belongs to you and supports your journey.

Another important element, which applies to totems as well, is secrecy. Don’t tell people about your ritual. I have a suspicion that when you tell your deep thinking something and keep it stored within yourself, your deep thinking keeps working on it. It doesn’t stop. That’s why, when you’re working on a creative idea, you might stay up all night thinking about it. But the moment you tell someone, it can feel like the energy drains out of it.

…So, when you’re creating a ritual, keep it within yourself. Let it be something personal and sacred.

If you’re already working with a therapist, absolutely talk to them. They can offer valuable recommendations for the emotional effect you’re trying to create. But at its core, a ritual is about getting yourself into the emotional or effective space you need.

This is where role therapy can be helpful too. We all step into certain roles in different spaces. For example, I’m in the process of re-establishing boundaries and routines after transitioning from the bush back to teaching at university. It’s been a rapid shift, and I’m building rituals to help me step into the roles I need to occupy.

Actors do this as well. There’s a concept I love called psychological gesture from Michael Chekhov, son of the famous Anton Chekhov. He used movement to find a gesture that embodied a character, feeling, or experience. Then, he would shrink that gesture and internalize it. When the actor needed to access that emotional space, they could simply think of the gesture, and it would bring them there.

So, your ritual can be anything you want—complex or simple. I prefer simple. The key is to ask yourself: What effect do I want at the end? You’re entering this liminal space through the ritual—how do you want to come out?

People create rituals for all sorts of things. For example, someone who experiences panic attacks might have a ritual they follow when they notice the signs coming on. They go through specific steps, enter the liminal space, and come out feeling grounded again.

There’s an abundance of ways to approach this. The …key is to find what resonates with you and aligns with the emotional or mental state you’re trying to cultivate.

So, start by asking yourself: What do I need this ritual to do for me? What emotional or mental space do I want to create or transition into? From there, let it be personal, intentional, and sacred. And remember, it doesn’t have to be perfect—it just has to work for you.

Joe:

For me, one ritual I have, if I want to feel, like, really grounded and in a good space internally, is performing this ten-minute play I wrote for three characters. I just perform it myself, you know? I literally jump around in the backyard.

Sometimes, when I really let myself go for it—like, I’ll do this before a podcast or when I just want to be fully present—I find myself doing the weirdest things. I’ll be on the ground, lying there, listening, or just doing whatever feels right in the moment. And that’s part of the healing process for me.

Blayne:

There’s a particular drama therapy method I watched while I was in New York. I participated in it, and it’s all about creating a completely improvisational, unsettling space. But the facilitator is guiding it.

So, while you’d be doing what you normally do, Joe, the facilitator might push you to go a little further in a certain direction. But the decision to push—that requires knowledge of psychotherapy and the client to make that call.

That said, breaking free of structured performances can be so liberating. So much of our frustration comes from worrying about performances—our own and other people’s—and what they mean to us.

But here’s the thing: there are no rules to the performance, man. All those weird things you’re doing in the backyard? You could do them anywhere. What are people going to do? Call you crazy? Why? Because they probably want to be rolling around in the grass too!

It’s that conflict between cultural performance and our capacity to say, ‘You know what? I can do something weird and different here.’

How often do you feel it? You’re in a place, and you get this urge to do something ridiculous. That’s a human trying to get out.

Joe:

Blayne:

I’m First Nations, descended from the Wailwan mob. My dad was stolen, and because of that, my journey and identity are deeply tied to dislocation—disconnection and intergenerational trauma.

For me, it’s been about understanding the ‘why.’ Why did we dance? Why did we do the things we did? That’s been my journey home.

Now, you’ve probably heard different terms—Aboriginal, Indigenous, First Nations. There are no hard rules about how they apply. Just ask the person. In the arts scene, we tend to use ‘First Nations.’ In academia, I’ve found ‘Indigenous’ is more common.

Personally, I prefer ‘Indigenous’ because I see indigeneity as more of a dimension or spectrum than a binary. Indigeneity was only made a binary in relation to colonizers.

Part of my work, especially in meditation, is reminding people that we’re all Indigenous. We’re all descended from Indigenous ancestors. I often invite people to imagine every footprint they’ve ever left glowing on the Earth. Then, I ask them to follow those footprints back in time.

Eventually, those footprints get smaller and smaller, becoming the footprints of a family, a single mother, or institutional workers. And if you keep going back, you reach a place where the footprints leave circles on the Earth—circles in harmony with the cycles of the Earth. Daily circles for the sun, seasonal circles for the year.

We all have that Indigenous ancestry somewhere. It’s about a direct, living relationship with the land and a lateral relationship with the community.

There are universal aspects of Indigenous identity, like being more collective than individual. But for me, it’s about disconnection.

My dad’s story is a big part of this. He was taken as a baby, and when he was seven, he and his twin sister were split up. He was put into institutional care and didn’t even know he was Indigenous—or that he had a mother—until he was ten or eleven, around the time of the referendum.

The first person who told him about his mother said, ‘You don’t want to meet her. She just wants to put you to work for grog.’ Imagine saying that to a ten-year-old boy about his mother.

Thankfully, he eventually got to go home, and that worked out well. But there’s so much pain and disconnection in that part of the journey.

For me, my life is about the healing return—so that later generations can access what I can’t. That’s the reality of intergenerational trauma and what is fundamentally genocide.

But there’s also beauty in it. I feel safest in places where I’ve been welcomed, especially when I’m with aunties. There’s something about aunties—they’re just chill.

So, that’s my flavour of indigeneity. It’s tied to disconnection, but it’s also about finding my way back and helping others do the same.

Joe:

It’s about taking your time, being yourself, and trusting the river. That’s the philosophy I’ve taken from all the work we’ve done, and it feels like a good way to segue out.

The idea of the river is something I got from an uncle, Abu Maury, back in the naughties. He told me, ‘You’ve got to follow the edge of the river. If you go into the water, you’ll drown. If you go into the bush, that’s where the monsters are. You’ve got to follow the edge.’

That’s become a philosophy for me. Yes, we’re going to be following our river our whole lives. We can imagine what the ocean is like by stepping into the water, but if we do, we drown and get carried away in whatever direction the current takes us.

Sometimes, we want to get past our pain and trauma faster, so we take a shortcut and go into the bush. But then we’re fighting, struggling, and maybe even getting lost—or worse, ending up on someone else’s river and believing it’s our own.

The key is to walk along the edge of the river, taking every single step along the way. It takes time.

I think the only places where great struggles are overcome in a single, glorious battle are in Hollywood or the history books—and both are works of fiction. There’s no grand moment where everything happens, and you suddenly find yourself. There’s no grand initiatory practice. That’s capitalism. That’s consumerism.

I’m better than I was ten years ago. I’ll be better in ten years’ time. And if we all keep doing the work—those of us who are so passionately community-focused and forward-looking—then we’ll be better in ten generations’ time than we are now.

Just like we’re different now than we were ten generations ago. We’ve had some visitors along the way, but anyway…

Joe:

Blayne:

Joe:

Blayne:

So much of embodied practice—and you see this in academia and theory—is already Indigenous. It’s just that someone wanted to put their own label on it, yeah? Their own brand. Thankfully, that’s starting to shift.

I went to a conference last week, and I was glad to hear people acknowledging that their ideas are implicitly Indigenous.

The thing about Indigenous practice is that you’re sort of already doing it, Joe, because it’s embodied. It’s human. It’s direct. It’s not about artifacts or non-human things. It’s not about being online. It’s about humans in a space together.

If you asked me how to decolonize theaters in Australia, I’d tell you to burn the theaters down and dance by the light of the fire. It’s humans in space, being.

And there’s also the importance of protocol—creating a safe, liminal space. It’s not just about saying, ‘This is a safe space, so everyone just talk.’ There’s more to it than that. It takes time and practice. But when you find that healing tribe, you’ll have it.

I think we’re already moving in that direction. Slowly, we’re getting over the technological trinkets we’ve been sold in exchange for our humanity. We’re coming back to sitting around a fire, grabbing a guitar, and letting people speak their truth.

And when they do, just listen. Don’t offer an answer—you don’t know it. I guarantee you don’t. If they don’t know it, you don’t know it.

So, listen. Sit with it. Slow down. And remember: anything that isn’t a human set of eyes looking back at you is artificial. It’s a representation, not a real thing.

If you’re ever stressed or worried in the moment, I like to bring my attention back to my feet. Feel what I’m in contact with, feel what’s underneath me, and ask myself, ‘Am I in danger right now?’

I’m not, because I’ve got the land underneath me. Why not? Do you, man. Woo!

Joe:

Blayne: