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’.