This workshop is aimed at exploring the dramatic model of personhood, which is presented in my latest book Drama, Creativity and Intersubjectivity, and further developed.
The model, starting with a rejection of the traditional dichotomy body/mind, considers the radical intersubjectivity of human beings, and describes the mind as a variable border between the organism and the world. The environmental frames we grow into provide us with the rough material with which our identity will be formed: relationships, roles, knowledge and narratives, which we will tend to identify as our selves, and will try to harmonize and control them. Our identity struggle is just this: the vain effort to keep them together as our own, while they are actually intersubjectively made.
According with this premises, drama is seen as the stage where people’s identities can be safely unlocked; a protected space where our relationships, roles, knowledge and narratives can be seen, recognized and put again into game. They can be reconsidered through the dramatic distance, and can be transformed and rearranged through the dramatic imagination, opening a wide range of possibilities regarding our being in the world.
The workshop is structured according with the threefold pattern of the dramatic process. In the first part (Foundation), we will work mainly with the body, fostering its capacity of creative communication, in order to empower the group as a place of encounter and exchange. The second part (Creation), will be devoted to the exploration of our relationships, roles, knowledge and narratives, using dramatic imagination as a tool to expand, connect, recombine, and transform them. The third part (Sharing), will serve as a closure, in which the common experience will be celebrated and discussed, trying to extract from it some cues for our everyday work as dramatherapists.