Staff Writer
One may not imagine flipping through the air upside down, dozens of feet above the ground, to bring a sense of calm, but members of Hilltown Youth Recovery Theatre summer recovery intensive program may say otherwise.
The intensive program teaches area children, teens and young adults unique arts-based healing practices and was founded by Jonathan Diamond, a local psychotherapist specializing in trauma and addiction in adolescents. For more than a decade now, Diamond has run the Hilltown Youth Recovery Theatre, a year-round after-school and summer performing arts program that puts on an annual “traveling summer spectacle” play at the Berkshire East Mountain Resort.
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Five years ago, Diamond also started the week-long summer intensive program for children and young adults overcoming addiction, anxiety, depression and other mental health challenges. He said a majority of program participants come from Franklin County, while others come from Hampshire or Hampden counties, and as far as Connecticut or Boston.
“We started with eight kids, now it’s grown to be anywhere from 12 to 30 kids in the intensive program,” Diamond said.
On the final night of this year’s intensive program, Aug. 10, after spending the day practicing trapeze flying and catching, participants were at Berkshire East Mountain Resort aerial park for a “lantern light training” from 7 to 11 p.m. Margaret Hopkins, a member of the trapeze team, said she loved spending the summer flying with the kids in the program, and most have been flying for years now.
This is Hopkins’ fourth summer working on the trapeze team alongside flying trapeze instructor Arlie Hart. After following a friend to an aerial yoga class, Hopkins said she found her way into recreational circus activities and started on the trapeze when she was 20. She has been in love with the art form ever since.
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“It’s magic,” Hopkins said. “There’s a few different elements to it that make it work really well for what we do.”
She explained that it takes three people to facilitate one new person flying on the trapeze: the person holding the safety lines; the person holding your belt and hanging you off the edge as you reach for the bar; and another person on the ground talking you through it. No matter what you do on the bar, the only way to get down is to drop to the net below, which Hopkins said only emphasizes a metaphor of trusting their peers to catch one another.
“You have to trust yourself and trust them, so it’s a really interesting space where it only works if you trust the process and trust your people,” she said. “We hand you the bar and ask — ready? You jump off the board and you’re flying. It’s a wild feeling. … For me, there’s a split second of weightlessness that happens at the front and back of your swing. Those seconds are the most peaceful thing I’ve ever found.”
Participants in the multi-day recovery intensive program take part in trapeze, aerial fabrics and other theatrical training. There is no pressure for participants to perform, Diamond said, but the exercises use the “healing power of movement.”
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“Sometimes we’ll do things like get people on their feet for role play exercises,” Diamond said “That’s nothing new for the therapy world, but when you throw trapeze in there, it’s a little more exciting — right?”
Not only has the intensive program helped young kids through various struggles, Diamond said it also provides past participants with opportunities for summer employment helping younger children. Hilltown Youth Recovery Theatre received $4,000 earlier this summer to support youth jobs through the state’s Healthy Summer Youth Jobs Program. Diamond said this allowed them to pay a group of youth faculty for the summer. The youth faculty mentored students and helped run the three-week theater workshop and performance of “The Phantom Tollbooth,” which ran from July 31 to Aug. 3 at Berkshire East Mountain Resort.
Jeremy Forbes and Alex Schmidt, both 19, were co-directors for this year’s production. Schmidt said she joined as a participant in the intensive recovery workshop five years ago.
“I joined because I was having trouble with home life and with school, and I had severe anxiety and depression,” Schmidt said.
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Now she has returned as a staff member working with all of the Hilltown Youth Recovery Theatre group’s programs.
“This program — the recovery intensive, specifically — is where I learned to be authentic, found a strong sense of self, confidence, a community and a family,” Schmidt said. “No matter what combination of people are here year after year, I always feel like I’m at home.”
Diamond said the group fosters a safe space, a support system and a loving community that breaks down the stigma of drug addiction, anxiety, mental health struggles and more. While designed toward these special focuses, he says the holistic program is something that every child could benefit from.
Megan Walsh, a psychology major at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in Adams, said this was her second summer as a team leader. While some of the theater movement practices may seem unconventional, Walsh said, she explained that Diamond and Artistic Director Zach Arfa focus on “trauma externalization” through the physical activities. Walsh said there have been research studies on the ways trauma is stored in the body, and “moving your body, especially in community, helps to revisit those experiences that were hard for you and embrace them in a different way.”
Hillary Hoff, a yoga instructor of nine years, had worked with the program from afar for a few seasons but was flown in from California to be a part of this year’s program in person for the first time to work alongside the theater group. She taught meditation, partner postures and acro-dance, a style of dance that combines classical dance technique with precision acrobatic elements. The Recovery Theatre program fosters a safe community where the young adults can learn to express themselves, and Hoff said “yoga is one of the perfect ways to do that.”
Diamond said it is possible the program has grown in size over the years due to a combination of young people becoming more comfortable speaking about their personal struggles and more people experiencing such struggles for the first time. He said it is also possible young people were experiencing struggles for the first time, or existing feelings were exacerbated by school closures, canceled social activities and the sense of isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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“The pandemic has revealed mental health issues for those without their usual ways of living or ways to cope,” Diamond said. “Kids were lit up like pinball machines as they experienced set-backs or flare-ups with existing issues or discovered new issues.”
Diamond referenced the Opioid Task Force and its efforts to change the conversation about addiction in the United States. He said drug addiction is something that has always affected members of the lower or middle class, but now many organizations across the country are working to bring conversations to the forefront of society as opioid addiction affects people “across the social strata” and gains more attention.
Starting this year, the Hilltown Youth Recovery Theatre has partnered with Denise Leckenby, who works in community health education with the state Department of Public Health, to conduct a three-year outcome study assessing the effectiveness and applications of the recovery intensive program’s art-based healing practices for child and adolescent mental health as part of her doctorate program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She spent this season familiarizing herself with the program and gathering initial data. The ultimate goal of the study, she said, is to prove the value of programs like the recovery intensive to advocate for funding support and further outreach to recruit more participants.
“There are a lot of recovery groups in Western Mass that are using innovative tools to add to what would otherwise be one-on-one therapy, an AA experience or a guidance counselor in school,” Leckenby said. “And this is a really unique space for something that I think is really important, in any form of recovery, which is finding a community.”
More information on the Hilltown Youth Theatre can be found online at hilltownyouth.org.
Zack DeLuca can be reached at zdeluca@recorder.com or 413-930-4579.
