According to William Blake, Imagination is the supreme creative faculty, that human beings share with God: the creation and the continuous renewal of the universe is an imaginative act. Imagination looks across and beyond reality, opening new perspectives and envisaging new possibilities. At the same time, it is the power that connects us with the others: we can love our fellows only if we are able to imagine them.
Dramatherapy is founded on imagination, which permits people to establish dramatic reality as a space of encounter. They experiment with its unique feature, the fact that in it people can either identify themselves with roles and stories that are staged, or distancing themselves from them, searching for their own personal aesthetical distance, where emotions and reasoning can dialogue. It grants the possibility to be the demiurges of the ‘world’ of dramatic reality, allowing people to create their own stories, which can be transformed and re-signified at will.
The dramatic process entails a continuous exchange and negotiation with the others. In dramatherapy, people can engage in cross-modal exchanges, entailing their sensitiveness to the ‘forms of vitality’ emerging in the interaction; they can experiment with rhythmic synchronization and attunement, which involve both mirroring each other and understanding their feelings and needs; they can rediscover the ‘virtual other’ within themselves and recover their capacity of ‘altercentric participation’. Reactivating the intersubjective matrix opens the doors for empathy and compassion.
The workshop will consist mostly in an analytical exploration of some deep creative and intersubjective processes that are set in motion by simple imaginative exercises. In particular, the three phases of the dramatic process (Foundation, Creation and Sharing) will be examined in details, noticing how individual and group imagination are unfolded, and how they interlace with our emotional and relational attitudes.