Dramatherapy, Beyond Consciousness Towards Awareness

Beyond Consciousness Toward Awareness

An important 3-hour long experimental laboratory to close the first semester of the activities of the Creative Drama & In-Out Theatre and of the FreeMind Theatre Workshop, founded and directed by E. Gioacchini

It can no longer be enough to think that because we are individuals with a conscience it is possible to believe in the harmony of things inside and outside of us, since Freud this in an indisputable truth. What it means to walk a more and more authentic path towards ‘awareness’, well that is a problem still open and without a univocal solution. The Carthesian “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am) has now an exposed side to the limitations of the constant temptation to make of the old anthropocentric vision a new tendency dressed up as cult of personality, as technophilia, as extreme individualism of nations and people. Just like ‘development’ is being replaced more and more often by ‘use of resources, sustainable development and growth’, so science and philosophy have re-connoted the individual person as ‘the one who assigns meaning’ and the consciousness of being is no longer enough to define us. So also dramatherapy, in its different applications, offers the possibility to meditate on the actual human condition of the individual and of the dynamics of groups, with a trans-cultural, transcendent approach, which also integrates diversity as a form of enrichment.

Dramatherapy, Emptiness' Fear without Our Mask

Drammaterapia e la Paura del Nulla senza la nostra Maschera

Dramatherapy Process as Shifting Cultivation

Dramatherapy Process as Shifting Cultivation.
(Dramatherapy Backstage, Astra and Fenice
in Sonia, the Rest of My Life, 13 maggio 2011)

Da Wikipedia, l'enciclopedia libera.

La "shifting cultivation" è una tecnica praticata dalle popolazioni che vivono ai bordi della foresta pluviale sempreverde.
Si tratta di una tecnica tipica nell'agricoltura familiare di sussistenza.
All'inizio della stagione secca avviene l'abbattimento di piccole parcelle della foresta secondaria attraverso i limitati mezzi delle popolazioni locali.

Le ramaglie vengono incendiate, le ceneri che si formano hanno un alto potere fertilizzante.
Poco prima dell'inizio della stagione piovosa vengono seminate diverse colture in consociazione. Molto spesso si tratta di specie amilacee da tubero (manioca, igname, taro, tannia), ma anche banano plantain, mais, arachide. La raccolta di queste specie varia a seconda del ciclo (dai 2-3 mesi fino a più di 24 mesi per le specie a ciclo lungo).
Vengono quindi ripetuti più cicli delle specie a ciclo breve all'interno di queste parcelle, il tutto caratterizzato da una "confusione" d'impianto: la consociazione non viene realizzata in maniera razionale come nell'agricoltura tradizionale, bensì in maniera disordinata. Ciò permette: di limitare gli interventi per l'eliminazione delle erbe spontanee, di far sì che le varie specie possano esplorare il terreno e lo strato aereo secondo le proprie esigenze, di limitare gli attacchi parassitari. Nel giro di pochi anni la fertilità decade quindi le parcelle vengono abbandonate per spostarsi in aree vicine non ancora disboscate. La foresta secondaria avrà una rapida ricrescita dalle ceppaie rimaste nel terreno.

Questo continuo abbattimento della foresta e la sua conseguente ricrescita è in perfetto equilibrio e quindi non viene arrecato un danno all'ecosistema foresta.
(in corsivo i perodi che si prrestano ad una corretta interpretazione della metafora)

Dramatherapy & Word's Value

Dramatherapy Workshop, DramaticaMente Theatre, April 2011 

Recently, I have had a friendly squabble on words with a dear friend of mine on Facebook. We were commenting on the passage by Pessoa I posted here some time ago. Words as simulacrum, words as symbol, words as concept, words as forms.

In the latest half century, the dispute between form and content has suffered a heavy blow with the discoveries (albeit not new ones) that contents have impressed on them the origin of the container and of its forms, whether they be apparent or linked to the symbolic-abstract thought, that casual forms have determined the development of evolution, and that with big numbers statistics always win, but it doesn’t reproduce the reality of thought.

This is a discussion that, at least here, would take us too far. It has ‘dangerously’ permeated our culture with relativism, but it has been necessary, just like in any transition towards a more refined conscience. I wish to take my cue from this to highlight some aspects of our important work, in which each one of you can with good reason feel a ‘soldier’ in the creation of ‘peace’ (I am referring to inner conflicts, obviously!).

My dear friend was expressing a belief which I generally share: we should unpeel reality from the superstructures (the reality we let work inside us: needs and desires) and keep the fruit of truth.

But do these pure nuclei of immanent guide of our plans actually exist? I was highlighting how, even when freeing reality from superstructures (the ones that you and I call frills, gewgaws... you know what I mean), we need to be careful. It is like taking away the shell from a snail! They speak ‘in rites’ (even a building can be a ‘rite’) of our fears, and they are signals, hidden or visible, of what we are, what we have been, what we might be. Along these lines, our ‘dramatherapy theatre’, together with the psychodynamic and creative roots, underlines the anthropological ones, discusses in particular the value of the symbol, of the rite, and with them it gets the participants to ‘play’.

Sometimes, I feel tempted to try a cautious and revealing discussion on Lacan, even with you, who know little of psychoanalysis and maybe of most of philosophy. Some minds fish ideas from the dreams that hang over our heads and they give them to all the other people. Then I realise that all buildings have their limitations, but that they are also an absolute, without comparisons.

So, in practical terms, whether they suddenly spring out of a freshly painted box or move amongst the invisible walls of places that have only been ‘thought’, these are our symbols! May your subconscious keep on working with them, in a productive way!

Backstage Dramatherapy Piece: Sonia, What Remains for me.



A dramatherapic play, written and directed by E. Gioacchini
(Creative Drama & In-Out Theatre)

Friday 13th May 2011. Dramatically Theatre and Creative Drama In & Out are delighted to invite actors and guests to the BackStage of our next pièce in preparation: Sonia, What Remains for Me... This BackStage, open to an audience of experts and general public, will allow us to show, in a live workshop, instruments and methods of dramatherapy theatre in the staging of a play (booking adviced).



Theatre, Actor and Dramatherapy

I hate being reductive, but I find that of summarizing, condensing, filing ideas ‘till they become concepts and concentrated versions of the tale of man to be an invaluable exercise; in this case, it is the profession of the actor. It is f this point of view, that the participants will read... the significant placement of the actor in dramatherapy and what differentiates it from traditional theatre. I am implying here all the other posts already discussed both in the CDIOT blog and in the blog of the Workshop FreeMind, which are preparatory to this discussion.

In Theatre

The Actor emerges from the encounter between the interpreter (specific training, specific artistic personality) and the character (characterisation of a role in the context of a pièce).

So, in theatre as in cinema, the actor is the result of a combination between a personality trained to ‘pretend’ and a character, as wanted by the author and identified by the director. 

The actor, with the whole theatrical machinery (stage setting, organisation), is ‘at the service’ of the text. The Actor emerges from the encounter between the interpreter (specific training, specific artistic personality) and the character (characterisation of a role in the context of a pièce). So, in theatre as in cinema, the actor is the result of a combination between a personality trained to ‘pretend’and a character, as wanted by the author and identified by the director. 

•  The Actor, with the whole theatrical machinery (stage setting, organisation), is ‘at the
   service of" Text;
•  The Text (the play) is ‘at the service’of the community;
•  The Theatre comes from the work of theatre (actor, director) together with community.
  

Theatre is  not a building, nor a theatre company, but rather an (artistic) ‘function’, which is exercised   through  the ‘creative’ exchange between actor and audience. For ‘theatre’ to happen you need at least an actor and a spectator (Grotowsky). The ‘show’ is made up of this interaction.

In Dramatherapy

Dramatherapy Workshop, "The Emotional Ground", DramaticaMente Teatro,
April 2011

• The Text is ‘at the service’ of the actor.
•  The Actor is ‘at the service’ of the interpreter.
•  The Dramatherapy' process moves in the direction of the evolutionary drive of the single personality and of the group, in re-defining resources and conflicts, boundaries and tasks.

In the Dramatherapy Theatre (for example the Creative Drama & In-Out Theatre) the whole "group process of dramatherapy" is ‘at the service’ of community. 

Dramatherapy: The Emotional Ground

The Emotional Ground

This dance is the final moment of our workshop, which explores the development of communication from that of animals to the aware intentionality of a developed being, an act of awareness, indeed a ‘dance’, a symbolic summing up which summarises phylogenesis and ontogenesis. In this experience, the warming up lies in suggesting identifications, sometimes exaggerating roles and attitudes. In the example given in the video, the micro-group (three people) is given an activity based on the idea of ‘memory’ all the way to ‘regret’. Later on, a tabula rasa places the objects on the ground, which is place of origin and primitive place, with a reciprocal contact that is casual: a chemotaxis preceding the development of more refined senses, such as hearing and sight, which will come later on. The participants keep their eyes closed and the only guidance is given by the space around them, free and full. Several million years and... the invertebrate being becomes ‘man’. The development of their senses and their awareness constitute in parallel a mind and a social organisation. This is what we define as culture. Culture determines a different social selection and a different social construction, even different from what instincts suggest. A new dance starts between earth and sky: the capacity of symbolic thinking. ‘Dance’ as a representation of conscience in the ritual passage from the biological to the mental, a bridge between origins and on-going development, in the summarising of different identities, no longer just ‘group’.

A symbolic Easter of peace and serenity

We would like to wish a symbolic Easter of peace and serenity to the whole Workshop and to all those who follow us and are patient with our performances, so wonderfully imperfect and so full of sense. I will do this with a composite of photographs made with some angels stolen in St Peter's by my daughter's camera and a dream that our friend Pulcinella gave us some days ago, fully acting it and combining it with so much emotion.

Thank you all, thank you Pulcinella. Many good wishes, from me and Emiliana.

"Un regalo per voi tutti con l'augurio di una meravigliosa Pasqua di pace e serenità: LA SCALA DELLA VITA.

Che belle le nuvole! E’ questo ciò che penso, mentre nella dimensione onirica di me adolescente cammino tra loro. I miei piedi scalzi ad accarezzare nel mio incedere spensierato questa morbida ovatta candida. Improvvisamente, innanzi a me una lunghissima scala a pioli di legno grezzo, con il naso all’insù la guardo per un attimo, con curiosità, cercando di capire dove può condurre. La vedo dissolversi tra i cumuli e con spensierata incoscienza, lentamente, inizio a la mia salita. Un piolo per volta. Decine, centinaia di piccole stecche di legno si inseguono sotto i miei piedi. Quando finirà? L’eccitazione della scoperta pian piano lascia il posto alla stanchezza. Ho paura. Non so cosa fare, non ne vedo la fine, vorrei tornare indietro, ma ci ripenso, non posso e non voglio arrendermi. Guardo in basso la lunghissima scala che si perde nel nulla, mi aggrappo con forza ai bordi che mi sostengono; sento che non ho più forza e la paura, la stanchezza, il dolore del lungo cammino lasciano ora spazio alla disperazione. Maledico la mia curiosità e mentre mi volto esausta per riprendere faticosamente il mio percorso... cosa vedo? Un enorme portone che prima non c’era! Afferro i battenti di bronzo, fauci di leone a sostenerle e con la poca forza ancora rimastami batto due colpi. Subito, come per magia, le grandi e pesanti ante si schiudono morbide quasi fossero ali e ciò che i miei occhi vedono ha davvero dell’incredibile. Un immenso giardino ombreggiato da alberi fioriti in una radiosa giornata di primavera inoltrata. Giù nel fondo una staccionata di legno e oltre solo cielo azzurro e nuvole. Tutti i colori hanno un’intensità tale che ne rimango rapita. Nel naso odore di muschio, fiori ed erba tagliata, ma ciò che maggiormente attrae la mia attenzione è il lento incedere di figure umane, tutte rigorosamente vestite solo di bianco. Una coppia in tipico stile Belle Epoque: lei sotto un enorme cappello, stretta in un bustino che le segna la vita, cammina ondeggiando la sua ampia gonna, accarezzando i fili d’erba sotto di sé. Per ripararsi dal sole, ha un graziosissimo ombrellino di pizzo. Accanto a lei un giovane uomo con i baffi all’insù e un cappello a cilindro le porge il braccio e l’ascolta rapito. Poco distante, un bimbo gioca rincorrendo il suo cerchio, un giovane soldato di una guerra non voluta appoggiato ad un albero, ascolta attento i racconti di due vecchi non più stanchi seduti su una panchina di pietra. Tutti nei loro abiti candidi sorridono e si muovono con dolcezza in quel verde e quell’azzurro limpido riscaldati dai raggi del sole che filtrano tra i rami. Quanta pace, quanta felicità! Sdraiata nell’erba, mi lascio cullare da questa sensazione e travolgere dall’emozione. Non vorrei più scendere quella scala e lasciare quel giardino, vorrei che il tempo si fermasse ora, per sempre, ma è mattino, mia madre mi chiama e risvegliandomi mi riporta alla realtà. “Perché mentre dormivi sorridevi? Cosa stavi sognando piccola mia?”- e lei - “Il Paradiso mamma!”.
Un sogno di tantissimi anni fa, ero piccolissima, non l'ho mai dimenticato. Forse è davvero così, chi può dirlo. Con affetto, Pulcinella.

The Planet made with Fear

@ director
“Hitler got it all wrong: if he had lived now he would have sent the Germans with their large boats to invade the world and nobody would have been able to stop them, because, well, there are humanitarian reasons.” This is fear, no, it is terror. The murder of Vittorio Arrigoni is terror and it is terror when diplomacy prostitutes ‘humanity’ with the law of the strongest.

"Vittorio Arrigoni", picture taken from the
facebook account

I have recently reminded of this a patient of mine who suffers from panic attacks: he could tenderly appeal to his own humanity, feel it as a value, let it, as well as the medications, protect him, while a hormonal storm was going through his body, but without causing damage. Yes, our fear can protect us from fear, when the events outdo reality, and then the panic stops hurting us, rather, it stops altogether. Just this year it is 30 years that I’ve been treating patients with panic attacks and I know that the reassurance “nothing more serious can happen to you” or more dreadful than what is already happening, when you are caught by panic, is of no use to calm you down. It is useful at the beginning, to clear the head from the confusion between physical and psychological, but when you then need to work them together (because nothing is only physical or only psychological), even ‘panic’ is useful to overcome panic. Then the conscience of values above our contingencies and our ritual worries acts as a ‘hook’ to which we can strongly hang our ‘salvation’. It takes us back to the awareness, beyond existence, to be beings who imperfectly attribute sense, but who, nevertheless, have the possibility of making mistakes and therefore learning.
A great man used to state (though I am not fond of quotations) that other people’s mistakes are useful to us because we could not learn everything from the ones we commit in our own limited existence... A nice definition that reassures on the issue of mistake, pushing the pedal towards responsibility, rather than ‘fault’.

Vittorio can save a patient (provided that they wish it) from a panic attack, from a hypochondriac thought, just when he, the volunteer, is choking for real, probably bound by a metal tie, in an abandoned room in Gaza. His life, his passion, made of the same catecholamines running abundantly in someone taken by panic, lead us to think, to feel in ourselves disapproval, no... anger and outrage, and then finally sorrow, instead of fear. It does not all happen just because we think about it, just because we read, moved, a newspaper article, but it happens more quietly, if our soul is nourished by events beyond the boundaries of our own walls. It is an internal ‘birth’, which from inside makes you feel free from fear, but able to experience it, if it is human. Inhuman are some deaths and tragedies, inhuman is the panic if its cradle is a civilisation with blinkers, which invents a thousand contraptions to photograph the world without really ‘reflecting’ it.

In the last few years, on the web and in TV programmes, I have often heard saying that “with the economic crisis the statistics of panic attacks has rocketed”, then it was the earthquake in L’Aquila, then the murders of Sarah and of Yara... Let me be ironic about the sharp scientific sense of those who use this information to ‘induce’ to crime... We know that a significant number of accidents in the air can raise the levels of fear to fly, that the climate of uncertainty terrorism has culturally created has a deep impact on our security, outside, but also internally. We do not need that professional skill that jackals have selected for biological survival to survive in us as well, preying on those who have already been preyed on: the information that uses itself to survive, through tragedy or fear. This is not ethical and it does not help those who suffer from ‘fear’.

In our brave theatre, but full of fear, we are aware that we have represented, in three different editions, The Kamikaze and that we have recorded it, while in Gaza and in Israel people were dying for real. We know that we have staged Bluebeard, while two young promising women were having their lives violated. The awareness and the reflection protect you form the deception of history, of the dictator, of the professional, of yourself. One can fight with values, without shooting, without arbitrary boundaries (when ideological ones, whether they rise or fall), against indifference, clichés, and comfortable armchairs, until an unfounded terror comes over us, unfortunately, and induces us to fight pointlessly against ourselves. What am I saying? It is intellectually honest to recognise that the failed integration between personal and social values, in culture as in the individual, may lead to our body and our mind working in haphazard ways, ways that are not useful to our own existence or to that of others.
Thank you, Vittorio.

Thanks to Emiliana Bianchi (Scotland,) for her translation

OTHER VISION: a musical performance with voice and celtic Harp. Performers, N. Maroccolo and C. Lauri

On 3rd February, in Rome, Creative Drama In-Out Theatre presents an intense performance by voice and Celtic harp, as part of a Cinema-Drama Therapy workshop, which is open to both professionals and the general public.

A performance by N. Marroccolo e C. Lauri  at the Gallery of Modern Art (Ardea),
dedicated to Giacomo Manzù', 8th October 2010

 

Nina Marroccolo and the musician Cristiana Lauri, modern and delicate bards, following the intuition and the need for Other Visions, act and play in music and song on the stage of cinema and drama therapy, creating magic in a singular artistic performance. They will awaken the emotions of the audience, offering them an ideal mirror in which to find themselves.

Entrance is free (booking advised)

INFO: info.atelier@dramatherapy.it

A Cinema-Drama Therapy Workshop: A Camconcorder Wading the Pond

Rome, 3rd February 2011
The point of view of a camcorder wading through the pond and filming both above and below its surface. Half frog and half Prince, the actor-character is led inside the very film to revisit his own actions and clothes, while the process of dramatherapy unfolds: cinema-drama therapy.

The workshop will be preceded by the presentation of the book:
Shaping the Sight, by Plinio Perilli (2009) Milan: Mancosu
Opening performance: Nina Maroccolo

leggi il COMUNICATO STAMPA
prenotati info.atelier@dramatherapy.it

Cinema-Dramatherapy & Dramatherapy: a new Resouces Training starts in Rome

As part of the new Dramatherapy for Resources Training, starting on 9th April in Rome, is a module on cinema-dramatherapy. The scientific back up of the course is by the Dramatherapy Workshop Freemind, under the aegis of the Italian Society of Experimental and Clinic Applied Hypnosis and of the Institute Roman School Rorschach.

A shot from a dramatherapy piece,
December 2007

The Course, directed by the Roman psychiatrist and psychotherapist Ermanno Gioacchini, will be organised in seminars, conferences and evening workshops (Friday nights), with the participation of trainers having a psychology background and of trainers coming from the world of entertainment. The methodology that will be used is based on the principle that dramatherapy can be used as a method allowing the participants to express creatively their own ‘artistic process’ through a wide range of activities, such as acting, hypnodrama, storytelling, music, play, mime, and dance.

Participants will be guided to experimenting and working on a personal interpretation of the language of theatre, which goes through both the stages of self-discovery, discovery of one’s body and its expressive potential, and the stage of reformulation of a new relationship with the outside world – space, objects and other people.

The first meeting will be held on Friday 9th April, at 8.00 pm. Places are limited.

For information and registrations, please contact:
CDIOT - Tel 0039-335-8381627 - Fax: 0039-06-86211363/70
E.mail, info.atelier@dramatherapy.it
Website, http://www.drammaterapia.com/

Photo: Rome Theatres, by C. Gioacchini

THERE ARE KEYS THAT MAKE A LOCK, DID YOU KNOW THAT?

There are keys that make a lock, did you know that?
Let’s explain. Those of us who know J. Cortazar will not fail to consider that something intimate and prophetic connects this great Argentinian writer with the French playwright Ionesco. Let’s try and bring them close, forgetting for a moment that they were in different places, times and were threading different paths. They both create a painful caricature of reality; they christallise it in stereotypes that only a really critical conscience can manage to renounce. It’s too easy to smile at the image of the watch that runs after the wrist, that runs after the arm, that runs after their owner! Too easy to read the worry of ‘reason’ in the face of the population of a whole town transforming into rhinoceros as simple non-sense. We shouldn’t consider a single character, because he is simply a crutch for a deeper theme. If even this theme disappeared from the dialogues, then the sense of the play would vanish. It is YOUR thought that lives in those characters, for the time of a reading or of a staging, and that needs to understand. The language helped us evolve, until we transformed, but it can hide under the thick folds of the rhinoceros’ skin; the conscience forgets it is a distinct identity.

I appreciate, but at the same time grin, at the government’s attempt to reassure us: Italy is safe from Swine Flu! Be brave, my friends - known and still to know – we will not change into pigs; in spite of the fact that we more and more show their habit of feeding on pretty much anything, real and virtual, they offer us. Thus we forget we are still ourselves, surrounded by many landscapes, often disguised by a thousand masks that Lacan invites us to observe! Boundaries are, oh, so important, when we can move them, contract them and widen them, until we can exalt or reassure! How much ‘imprisonment’ in the freedom of speech and how much freedom in the imprisonment of our solitude! Exasperate and grotesque individuals in Rhinocéros, pityingly asking for some relief to the rigidity of conscience-less behaviour, in which language loses its original symbolic power of the unconscious (Lacan); until their very appearance is transformed, with their language and the underpinning power of the signifier (in Ionesco) and the of the stereotypy of the character (in Cortazar). Our eyes and our ears perceive wandering and empty symbols that lack the possessions that make them historical for the experience of the individual and of the group. There is where they can be kept and given new meaning, just like in the analytical experience, that is related to the underlying meaning of the metaphor, to the metonymy proper of the dream. One needs a new fusion that gives back the power of attributing meaning and this happens between the actor and the audience. A key is a cryptic condensation of what the author meant, it pushes against doors without locks, without entrance. Non-sense spreads, words become empty, yet there is one hope: “The text can still be written”, Barthes would say. Weakened, the pretentious structuralist thought must surrender. The itinerary must be remade inside the character represented, because the foolish delirium of ‘fama’ is so disarming, while ‘cronopio’ tidies up his own folly!

The noise of a key, something is turning, the key turns itself, unknown rooms.

The Key

Seems I've been waiting half a life/ For things to arriveThat won't come/ Seems I've been waiting all this time/ For the perfect rhyme/ Now it's done/ But I forgot what it was I'm looking for/ I found the Key but not the door/ Nothing more/ HeyeyeyIs there anybody home tonight?/ I can hear you on the other side/ But I can't get throughI say heyeyey/ There's no beginning, there's no end/ A vicious circle 'cause I cannot mend/ The love I feel for you.
....

"...l'avant-garde c'est la libertè!"

On Thursday night we had the first meeting of the workshop When ‘Absurd’ crosses Theatre: Eugéne Ionesco a baptism at the spring of ourselves, at the beginning, where there’s vague shape and intense drive. Ionesco will be with us. We have forced him with the enticing message (but did it work?) that we are an anti-piece, like him, behind him; with the enticement that we have been following, now for a few years, the idea that the artistic process cannot be separated from the final product, or the consequence is a praise to the narcissism of art, like a monument that is made of marble and incorruptible or made of wood and combustible, a reductive amplifier of ‘fear’!

He twisted his nose a bit, I can assure you. That chubby-chops face is only the casual deception for those who pretend they have not received and provocation or stimulus, without the disguises of didactics, the perverse connections with the political, artistic or cultural establishment of each and every time period, with the aim to frighten the impersonal habit.
On the contrary, the idea of a dramatherapy that crystallises its process to turn it into theatre was taking shape. Founding it a r o u n d the Ionescian question of the Rhinoceros was the best possible choice. Not long ago, I was leisurely browsing one of those books you buy for a morbid curiosity and because it has been suggested to you: Theatre without a Director. It was suggested to me a couple of years ago by a representative of the European Association for Theatre Culture. The book itself has been written by the artistic director of this Association, Jurij Alschitz. Many passages of his text, so humanly autobiographic – an autobiography as search… - interested me, but one in particular summarised what I had been thinking for a while: “What I’m interested about in art not so much the final product, as the natural and spontaneous process that leads to it” (1). The idea of the artistic process as a process of truth, of hermeneutic research for a meaning to existence, so closely connected to what is creative in the shamanic vision, now showed me a further testimony. This director creates his/their theatre around the humanity of his actors; he bends destiny to the creative vision of what is happening and can be observed! And isn’t it Ionesco who states: “Je crois que la création artistique est spontanée!” [“I believe that artistic creation is spontaneous”](2)?

A forced analogy with what, in a different context, happens in the dramatherapic process, free from the rules of the stage - if they are too tight - and which makes the actors’ path its end, rather than its means. There are no less sacred Allelujas exploding in the streets, when they bring to successful communication, or on stage, where the two sensible sides of theatre, actor and audience, come into contact. It could be a stage diluted in the circular structure of Grotowsky’s theatre, or a traditional one, as long as it is possible to discover this modesty as a shadow that finds again the birth of drama every time it meets it. How enticing is the idea of gathering around an idea and letting it shape our intentions, disembodied by back-stages and floodlights, and of observing the tender wisdom of Bérgerer, when he advises his friend Jean to see a doctor.

I have an ambition, my strongest and most challenging: giving again visible humanity to Ionesco’s characters. Let’s be clear: not that they need it! They exist like this, human ‘capsules’ sleeping between language and logic, fear and recklessness, quarrelling with life, born to interrogate, between a chasm and anarchy. What would happen if they go through the soul of our actor? We are not on stage, we are in the particular context of dramatherapy, in the virtual space in which the ‘as if’ meets delirium and memory, with lapse and action; in which tenacious training (long live Grotowsky!) measures - rather than containing - the distance between reality and trauma, between pain and drive for life. The crossing will take a new appearance, it will leave something behind and it will take something on again. It’s a cat-walk, often silent, amongst an audience that has not paid, because invisible; mates of another time and of other stories. Then the message of the avant-guarde: “L’avant-guarde, c’est la liberte’” (3) takes on a new, human character, which is able to think over the transformations and the changes…over its identity.

(1) Alschitz, Jurij (2007) Theatre without Director, Pisa: Titivillus (p.19)
(2) Ionesco, Eugène, Expérience du théatre, in Notes et contre-notes, Paris: Gallimard (p.48)
(3) Ionesco, Eugène, Discours sur l'avant-garde, in Notes et Contre-notes, Paris: Gallimard (p. 91)

WHEN THE ABSURD GOES THROUGH THEATRE: EUGENE IONESCO

Dramatherapy Workshop, Thursday 30th April the 30th 2009 , 8.30 pm

The Creative Drama & In-Out Theatre, founded and directed by E. Gioacchini, sponsors a Workshop open to the public and dedicated to the works of Eugéne Ionesco. Two lecturers and an actress will be there to describe the author’s ideas and works, between acting and story-telling.

Outside totalitarianism and boundless liberalism, we find Ionesco’s invitation not to stop our search for our own meaning, freeing it from the apology of the individual and of their historical Babel, from the false reasons of freedom and of its limitation. It is a lesson in theatre and in life, artistic lyricism and aesthetics of reason. A workshop for professionals and not, through the enlightening vision of the playwright and with the scalpel of dramatherapy.
Directedby the psychotherapist E. Gioacchini, the actress N. Maroccolo, and the literary critic P. Perilli.
Free entrance, booking advised.
For info, call: (0039) 3403448785

Photo: Rhinoceros, by Albrecht Durer, 1915