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



Friday 22 April 2011

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.

Tuesday 19 April 2011

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