Connecting Seniors
Catherine Maguire-Donvito · 44 min
One theatre director's structured storytelling program is giving refugee teenagers the science-backed tools to process their trauma, reclaim their identities, and transform audiences of 50,000 high school students across Australia.
Catherine Maguire-Donvito runs Treehouse Theatre, a four-month program that helps refugee teenagers process trauma through structured storytelling and performance. The work rests on a simple, evidence-backed idea: trauma memories get stuck in the emotional part of the brain until someone helps you tell the story in words. Once you put what happened into language, your brain can move it from constant threat into memory.
The program starts safely. Students spend the first weeks in a circle sharing happy childhood stories, the funny moments and small scrapes that build trust and connection. A boy thought English speakers were doing something magical. A mother forgot her daughter at the shops. These stories matter because they let audiences see refugee students as people just like them. Only after weeks of safety does the group move toward the harder material. When trauma stories come, students tell them once to the circle, then again as they shape the story into script with Catherine, then repeatedly in rehearsal. That repetition rewires the brain. Students who wake from nightmares stop having them. Those who felt constantly threatened begin to see what happened as something in the past, not something still happening now.
The payoff runs both ways. Catherine has watched students go from barely able to speak in the circle to performing for 500-person audiences at the Seymour Centre. An Afghan girl named Nuria waded through razor wire to reach a plane. A Syrian boy named Haroon recovered a buried memory of laser sights crossing his body only weeks before performance. After Haroon told his story in his own school, the bullying stopped and he became a minor celebrity. Over a decade, roughly 40,000 to 50,000 high school students have watched these performances and left believing they knew refugees as actual people, not a political category.
Every story here belongs to the person who lived it. They said yes to sharing it, and we sat with it carefully before it went up. Nothing here is exaggerated and nothing is used without permission. Read how we handle these stories ↗
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