From ritual to drama and back in a rehabilitation day-care center

In this article, the intention is to present the form and meaning of a specific, private, unofficial ritual among a group of elderly people in a geriatric day-care center. The aim is to demonstrate how ritual activity germinates the emergence of spontaneous drama and how this drama itself is transformed back into ritual and vice versa. This pattern takes its shape through the transformative power of play, which keeps the axis of options for elderly people to express themselves with ever open. This ritual event thus becomes a resource for self-empowerment by elderly people.