In my latest book, Drama, Creativity and Intersubjectivity, I maintained that the dramatic process in itself, whatever its narrative contents might be, has the power of reawakening our intersubjective matrix, which, according to the new paradigm of human nature emerging from the recent interdisciplinary researches on the subject, is the deepest root of our being. Being an inborn predisposition, it manifest itself in early infancy, fostering the baby’s abilities of emotional attunement and cross-modal communication, and persists as the life-long foundation of any further development of people’s interpersonal relationships (Bråten 2007, 2013; Stern 2004). Although such a process can be blocked or hindered by life’s events, and covered under layers of fear, suspicion and destructiveness, it remains in each person as a potentiality that can be restored and fulfilled. In dramatherapy, this task is accomplished in a gentle and respectful way. In the Foundation phase (Pitruzzella, 2004) the play of mutual mirroring is aimed at opening the affective and emotional channels, and at promoting an expressive use of the body, fostering the recovery of primal cross-modal communication among people. In the Creation phase, the occasions of mirroring ourselves in the others multiply and vary; the emotional flows cross the thresholds of dramatic reality, and, while the possibility of mirroring ourselves in the others as persons is maintained, we can also let ourselves mirror in their imaginative products. Imagination provides a medium through which people can calibrate their reciprocal distance, balancing Buber’s ‘fundamental words’ I-Tou and I-It, and eventually discovering what my late lamented mentor Roger Grainger called Betweenness, the space between people that at the same time divides and connects. In the Sharing phase, the recovered intersubjective space modulates itself as a container where the experiences of the previous phases can be recollected and shared.
This four-parts workshop is aimed at experimenting with this principle, exploring the three phase of the process, and trying to identify along its flow those ‘states of grace’ (Pitruzzella 2002) that herald change.
It will be introduced by a short lecture, where I consider some brilliant intuitions of Roger Grainger - to whose memory it is dedicated - on dramatherapy’s profound humanness, comparing them with the intersubjective perspective. Roger’s ideas are rooted in his visions of ritual and theatre as places where betweenness can unfold itself, and concern not only dramatherapy’s methods and theories, but also its message at an ethical and spiritual level. From the comparison, a novel, powerful and overarching notion of empathy emerges.
In the second part we will explore some basic foundation exercises, analyzing them in detail under the light of Daniel Stern’s concepts of ‘present moment’ and ‘forms of vitality’, in order to explore how simple and apparently insignificant events of encounter and exchange, may have an impressive potentiality of healing and transformation.
The third part will be dedicated to share the experience, and analyze it according to the above exposed points of observation, in order to discuss and deepen the proposed theoretical frame.