WELCOME


The Dramatherapy Workshop FreeMind is an open space, so long as it goes on consolidating its thinking and its practice. A blog will allow the extension of the communication: drama widened to ideas and competences. Director, E. Gioacchini


@ Director As mind master of the CDIOT, this gives me the opportunity to open a discussion on the fascinating Mind's Creative Processes and the Theatre. So I invite you to join our community, getting it prestigious, because it will be built with your intuitions and questions, meditation and inner answers. This is the place where you can use the freedom to express your doubts and you ideas, sharing with the others the research of your way. The Mind is a living miracle, available better than we could immagine; the theatre is a powerful tool to get deeply its power! But what beyond our discussions? Prepare for becoming part of a new way to discuss with your right emisphere. Explore the real power of hypnosis, dramatherapy and cinema-dramatherapy and get away its magic and false misconceptions.Work nicely with us to create our friendship and the warmth of our curiosity and mind’s exploration. Learn, enjoy and get excited! Help yourself adapt to altering life-style changes..if there’s one constant in our life today it’s change; from every direction and faster than ever. Let’s make the dream a reality...and much much more! Contact and interface with our staff; psychiatrists and psychologists will help you to get your life better!I’m just looking forward to seeing your messages here!


"It does not take much strength to do things, but it requires great strength to decide on what to do" Elbert Hubbard



Monday 4 May 2009

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.
....

Sunday 3 May 2009

"...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)