Theatre Therapy: ‘I AM I’ - Exploring Self
Theatre Therapy: ‘I AM I’ - Exploring Self
(A workshop for actors and non actors)
Explore your self through the medium of theatre
- Critical seeing, self awareness.
- Going with our feelings of the moment.
- Breaking out from the preconceived mould and repetitive patterns of our daily life.
- Staying free of all the outside influences, which restricts our personal growth.
- Balancing the emotions.
- Understanding and breaking the negative psychological structure and patterns of our mind.
- Dislodge “the cops in the head”, placed there by society or personal experience.
What to wear: loose-fitting clothes (e.g. sports track pants). Jeans, tight trousers, skirts, tops with low necks are not suitable.
The theatre exercises, which will be used during the exploration (or the process) has a different approach altogether.
Rather than trying to break through an individual’s psychological defences (this type of pseudo-psychiatry can be very harmful), the participants are encouraged to contact their vulnerability through their physical body and the use of imagination instead of sense memory.
We work through metaphor (elements of nature, animals, man-made objects), improvisations, and imagination exercises.
Because of the impersonal nature of these techniques, we do feel under personal attack as we try to reach the deeper layer of our self.
These exercises are designed to spark some inspiration and creativity.
(Voice and body is one integral unit. For example, tension in the voice curtails the body’s freedom of expression. In most of your work you will use the voice as well as the body)
The Process
Approaching the selves
Feelings are universal. Everyone has them. By understanding your own feelings and identifying them, you can recognize the feelings of others.
This identification process serves as the basis for any kind of personal growth and maturity.
Workshop would focus on only six of the many aspects of our self. These six aspects of our self embody the most important quality of our physical, psychological and emotional life. Each aspect of self will be worked on as an independent unit.
Focusing on each aspect separately strengthens our emotional totality.
The Six Selves
- the vulnerable self
- the instinctive self
- the social self
- the trusting self
- the unresolved self
- the decisive self
The vulnerable self – Experiencing our own vulnerability, will let us identify and identify the vulnerability of others. It helps to break our inhibitions and phobias.
If you remain open to life, you remain vulnerable.
To live is to be vulnerable.
The instinctive self – Ever since childhood, in order to make you a social creature, your environment has conditioned you to smother your instinctive self.
Some of us never find it again.
We don’t know how to evoke the spontaneity, truth, and passion that are latent in our instinctive self. Dominance by the brain leads to over intellectualization and analytical understanding, rather than instinctive response.
To find your instinctive self, is to live in a realm where there are no laws, no standard of right or wrong.
To act instinctively is to act spontaneously. To act spontaneously is to act truthfully.
The mind has planned no deceptive strategies. You reveal your state of being at the moment.
It is like reverting to a primitive sate where you have no social image to adhere to, to a level of infancy, of innocence.
The social self – The social self is a part of you that controls your instincts and emotions. It is as if you are a two person at the same time, the repressed instinctive self and the social self who watches the outside world and behaves according to is rules. You create an image to fulfil demands made upon you by the society.
The social self recognizes, focuses on, and suppresses emotions which are “inappropriate” to a given situation.
Self interest (ambition, fear, embarrassment) or kindness (concern for the feelings of others) requires that you do not react openly.
Understanding the social self is the key to understanding our complexity and inner conflicts in which we human beings are caught.
The trusting self – Finding and accepting your trusting self will reinforce your ability to overcome self-consciousness and inhibitions. The childlike playfulness that is released through exploring this facet of your personality will liberate your creativity.
What is it like, this trusting self? It is the all trusting part of you that exist in a completely non-threatening world. There is no need for defences. You receive from the world and give instantly, without reservation or calculation.
The trusting self is a dancer, almost constantly on motion, like a silk scary floating in space.
Without memory, without accumulating experience, your trusting self surrenders to every element, doing as it wills, unresisting, accepting.
Its fusion with the world is complete and joyous.
The unresolved self – This facet of our personality lives during times of transition, in the passage between one action and the next, the suspenseful thread weaving your action together.
Understanding unresolved self helps you to live through physical, psychological, and emotional transition from action to action in our daily life.
It gives birth to a new and comprehensive awareness, creative the decisive self.
The decisive self – The decisive self acts the resolution. It enables you to overcome indecision and make choices. The tension physical or psychological – is always emotional. Therefore when you practice your decisive self, the physical release is a emotional release as well.
Your conscious and intuitive intelligences co-ordinate, interconnecting all your facilities to make a choice. Each choice implies a risk.
Daring goes hand in hand with losing fear of exposing yourself. The greater the risk, the more courage you have to muster to act decisively.
And the greater is the freedom once you act!