Recent decades have seen a new appreciation develop for applied theater and the role of arts-based activities in health care. This book looks specifically at the place of theater for children who are hospitalized, showing how powerfully it can enhance their social and mental well-being. Child-led performances, for example, can be used as a technique to distract young patients from hospitalization, prepare them for painful procedures, and teach them calming techniques to control their own pre- or post-operative stress. Persephone Sextou details the key theoretical contexts and practical features of theater for children, in the process offering motivation, guidance, and inspiration for practitioners who want to incorporate performance into their treatment regimen.   '[I]n Theatre for Children in Hospital Sextou describes a range of institutions (medical and educational) and individuals transformed by the use of theatre in healthcare. Her book takes its title from a particular genre, Theatre for Children in Hospital (TCH), and one of its unique forms: a site-specific bedside performance that addresses a pediatric patient's immediate needs, as improvised by a skilled and empathetic performer based on a rehearsed script that anticipates the interactions and anxieties common to being in the hospital (38-41,11). ' 'Persephone Sextou comprehensively frames Theatre for Children in Hospital (TCH) as a bedside and interactive theatre approach concerned with reframing illness and the identity of children in hospital, and argues that TCH offers children the possibility to have a positive experience in an environment that can otherwise be daunting. The author shares her expertise as a practitioner and a researcher working with TCH in NHS hospitals in the UK, thereby crafting an in-depth analysis both from within the process (as a theatre-maker) and from the margins of the process (as a scholar outside the medical field). The book is written from an artistic and philosophical perspective, placing compassion at the heart of TCH artists' work with children. This also means that readers in healthcare may find themselves frustrated with the idea of having to negotiate who is more altruistic, the artist or the healthcare professional; and which is more compassionate, the "hard data" or the qualitative research?' Persephone Sextou is a reader in applied theater and research director of the Community and Applied Drama Laboratory at Newman University, Birmingham, UK.   Theatre For Children In Hospital The Gift of Compassion By Persephone Sextou Intellect Ltd Copyright © 2016 Intellect Ltd. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-78320-645-2 Contents Foreword, Prologue, Introduction, Chapter One: A TCH definition and more ..., Chapter Two: The distinctive features of TCH practice and research, Chapter Three: TCH as a choice: 'I want to make a difference!', Chapter Four: Concluding thoughts, Appendices, Appendix One: Breathing with Love, the script, Appendix Two: The shape of our bedside theatre rehearsals, Appendix Three: Writing a TCH proposal plan (bid), Appendix Four: Example of application letter, Appendix Five: Guidance for applying for NHS Research Ethics Committee approval (for researchers only), Note on the author, Bibliography, Index, CHAPTER 1 A TCH definition and more ... Applied theatre in hospitals I position my TCH bedside methodology broadly under applied theatre. Applied theatre is an inclusive term used to host a variety of powerful, community-based participatory processes and educational practices. Historically, applied theatre practices include Theatre-in-Education (TiE), Theatre-in-Health Education (THE), Theatre for Development (TfD), prison theatre, community theatre, theatre for conflict resolution/reconciliation, reminiscence theatre with elderly people, theatre in museums, galleries and heritage centres, theatre at historic sites, and more recently, theatre in hospitals (Nicholson 2014). 'Applied' refers to an act that takes theatre practices out of the obscure black boxes and brings them back to the 'open air' [...] [It] should be understood as a contemporary theatre practice that has many different histories and varied rationales depending on where it is happening. (Thompson 2012: xix) Thompson concentrates on the evolving process of applying theatre to community audiences and invests in learning about being human, being a citizen and being empowered to think and act in the particular moment and context within which theatre takes place. He also argues that the 'act of applying [theatre] is an unfinished process that encounters situations that are themselves evolving and not fixed examples of social practice' (Thompson 2012: xxi). But aren't all arts an unfinished process? Arts change over the years because humans change and environments change. Different styles of theatre and forms of theatrical applications outside traditional venues have been discovered,