Introduction

Over the course of eight weeks, a different set of characters met. They included weather systems, light sources, plants, songs, galactic objects, and comforting foods. They gathered via Zoom windows to create artwork, discuss illness, relationships, daily challenges and survival, and to witness and support one another. Their names shifted each session, creating the illusion that new characters arrived each session while a relational familiarity accumulated. A squirrel did not return, but instead, grunge music arrived. A campfire’s absence was filled by a knowing orchid. A slow alien ship shared a story about a friendship conflict, while ‘shotgun’ told its trusted cohort of soundtracks how cancer was the hole they had ‘become great friends’ with.

The screenplay (a term used intentionally, as the program itself unfolded on participants’ computer screens via Zoom) emerged, with the consent and collaboration of its participants, from a virtual art therapy group for adults living with cancer and formed part of a larger research study examining the psychosocial experience of virtual art therapy. The study was conducted by this writer in collaboration with the cancer support organisation Gilda’s Club Toronto and was submitted in conformity with the partial fulfilment of the graduate diploma at the Toronto Art Therapy Institute, Canada. In contrast to the pre-program interviews and post-program surveys used in the research, which allowed participants to articulate their individual expectations, concerns, and perceived benefits, the screenplay examined these processes indirectly. The therapeutic movement of the group is not conveyed through direct declarations of change, but through resonance, response, and collective witnessing. As characters move fluidly between positions of vulnerability, support, humour, and reflection, relational forms of hope, altruism, and universality begin to emerge between them. Rather than functioning as a transcript, the screenplay reconstructs the group's relational field through metaphor, fragmentation, repetition, and collective witnessing. Participants’ reflections during art-sharing, alongside the metaphorical language generated by weekly icebreaker exercises, were transformed into a polyphonic dramatic text.

The process of creation drew on narrative therapy, collective documentation, arts-based research, and post-dramatic theatre. Narrative practices informed a collaborative, transparent, non-pathologising approach to documentation (White & Epston, 1990), while arts-based research positioned aesthetic form itself as a mode of inquiry rather than illustration (McNiff, 2007). The screenplay structure was further informed by post-dramatic concepts of polyphony and collective presence, in which multiple voices coexist without resolving into a singular narrative authority (Lehmann, 2006).

The decision to work in screenplay form emerged gradually through engagement with the session note materials. Earlier attempts at poetic synthesis and collective narrative writing compressed participant voices into a unified ‘we’ (a form used powerfully developed by narrative therapy practitioners such as David Denborough (2008)), subsequently flattening the distinct tonalities, rhythms, and contradictions that characterise the group therapy process. The screenplay offered another possibility: a structure capable of holding simultaneity, fragmentation, interruption, resonance, and return. The recognisable visual language of the screenplay – the courier font, spacing, and characteristic formatting – shifts the text away from record and toward imagination, potential and re-creation.

Participants are not represented in the screenplay through fixed pseudonyms but through metaphorical identities generated during the sessions themselves. One week, participants arrived as weather patterns, another week as sources of light, botanical plants, or soundtracks. These temporary forms became dramaturgical containers that protected anonymity while preserving emotional texture and imaginative specificity. The recurring chorus, which emerges more frequently as familiarity between characters grows, functions not as a singular speaker but as a collective field of witnessing through which encouragement, humour, reframing, grief, and recognition circulate among participants.

Selected screenshots of participants’ artworks are interspersed throughout the screenplay, though not every image from the program is included. The play, therefore, moves between visual traces of participants’ creations and the reader’s imaginative reconstruction, further fragmenting the piece's temporality and continuity.

What follows is not an excerpt from a clinical record, but a collective document situated somewhere between testimony, performance, memory, and dream. It is neither a transcript nor fiction, but a polyphonic reconstruction of the relational textures of the group therapy experience, gesturing toward the ways in which support, meaning, and connection emerge within the shared experience of illness.