Definition  of Theatre-Therapy

 

The Theatre-Therapy is a type of group Art-Therapy, now more and more largely common and well-known. It is an original approach, recently developed by some psychologists and actors in Italy and abroad, matching psychological theories and the craft-made usual procedures of scenic setting.

 

We could define the Theatre-Therapy as the staging of his own experience and background, inside a group, supported by some principles derived from the art of the actors. It involves education to sensibility and perception of voice and body movement; after a detailed pre-expressive work, essential to the creation of the Altro da se, not daily mainly improvised characters are presented, making possible a conscious therapeutic reaction.

 

We could say that the target of a Theatre-Therapy meeting is to make harmonic the relationship among body, voice, mind and soul, in the relationship with the other, the others, with himself and his own interpretative creativity. Any single group session will continue to be effective in each  participant also afterwards, because the received stimuli become part of a deep experience, which  he can integrate in every day life. Theatre-Therapy neither gives diagnosis nor psychological interpretations, but it strengthens a new imagine of himself; it can not substitute psychotherapy, but it comes alongside it.

 

IMPROVISATION

jazz theatre

 

Such as in the music, when soloists improvise on harmonies or given themes, also in theatre, text and action physical score could be considered a guide, whereas actors will be easily able to improvise and modulate their interpretative variations.

“The jazz allowed an early break toward the current improvisation. There was a link with the automatic writing of surrealism. Chronologically, the flies in the improvisation area of jazz players precedes Dada and surrealism experiments. Amazed, we listen to Charlie Parker: he was pushing forward improvisation jazz, carrying it very far. He created inside our ears … He inspired and showed us that the great fly of the bird was possible becoming really committed and then letting himself go. So Julian Beck writes in the late sixties, with the regard to The Brig which revealed to the Living Theatre an important discovery around the art of playing.

“ To improvise was essential. The actors who played in The Brig reported that up there, on the stage, in the cage, a special thing was happening, something that never happened in others plays. All those years we have been speaking about reinventing every moment (the all pile of testimonies written by Stanislavskij and his school), we deceived ourselves. To make it real, we must do this: the real travel, physical travel, invented moment by moment, reality, reality which changes and recreates continuously itself, the need of reality (life) in this period of alienation; improvisation like the breath which made the reality live on the scene. We could no longer to not improvise. Afterwards, we should have been building pieces with enough flexible forms, allowing us to be discovering how to create life, rather than simply to repeat it (see : J.Beck, La vita del teatro, Einaudi, 1975).

Contrary to this idea of creation, to day it is often thought that to improvise means to make music, to write verses, to give a speech o to perform a series of movements without study or training. We say  “you turned yourself into an artist” of someone whose play was prepared hurriedly, often without a specific practice and with carelessness. But, starting with the psycho-dramatic technique, which uses improvisation like the only instrument to arrive to the unconscious spontaneity, to the research theatre (I think to Stanislavskij, Grotowski, Barba), to improvise means to dedicate himself to play a precise role, in a defined score.

To improvise means to be unexpected, the contrary of foreseen, all that happens suddenly, unthought-of. An unexpected and sudden action, that is never put in a cultural gap, but it is based on a may-be forgotten knowledge and often combines two or three ideas, distant one from the other.

In the famous passage West End Blues that is the jazz epitome, Louis Armstrong breaks with the previous age combining two ideas – the break and the stop-time in a free time rhythm. “In the jazz, Louis had found what is completely equivalent to the hundreds of cornet popular rhythms, which were integral part of the American music tradition. From this point of view, by the jazz trumpet we come back to the origins, when the soloist is the attraction of those outdoor bands, which will contribute definitely to make jazz an instrumental music”. So writes Gunther Schuller, well-known jazz composer, about Armstrong’s musical findings whose style gave me, who knows little about music, strong emotions particularly through the energy strength of the first notes:

 

 

“Those four notes should be listened by all people who do not understand the difference between jazz and other music, and by those who doubt the uniqueness of swing element. Those notes, such as sung by Louis – not such as they look on the paper – are a lesson of swing, the most educational that could be offered by jazz. The Louis’ way to start each note, the quality and the right length that he gives them, his way to abandon them and the following instant silence before the following note – in other words the whole acoustic profile – present a smaller version of all jazz inflexion essential characteristics”. (ibidem)

We are very far from considering jazz like an improvised music, plaied by self-taught people, without theoretical elements, even if their humble origins, socially “unacceptable”, misled many misicologists. At theatre, we have a similar phenomenon. The complicated typology of the improvising “method” is as old as the hills and within everybody’s grasp, but only actors try to imagine finding syntax, structural organisation, action rhythm, vocal sonorities, tale dramaturgy, that is to improve their execution, which becomes more efficacious with respect to spectators.

Therefore, the widespread origins of the performative improvisation should not to deceive the grammar of the theatrical mounting and least of all to make us think that it is – like psychodrama – a rout for itself, without the target to transmit something to the spectator at the end of the process. Actually, there are different acting methods and theories, which incorporate also improvisation. But let’s see in detail what improvisation means.

Firstly, I  think that it is the privileged channel which leads the actor to life itself, I mean the poetics of the person, expressed in the performative action. Such as Living Theatre had already guessed, it is a freedom margin, where life is the whole and absolute art, able to express all the soul of the world that contains it. During the magic moment of improvisation, actor is connected to the unknown, unconscious, archetype.

Necessarily poor of technical instruments, it is based almost exclusively on the sensibility of the soul and on the care that the actor puts in colours, scents, sounds, memories, wounds … narrating and acting without that inhibitory reserve that is companion of man, in its daily life.

At theatre, there is not a free improvisation, but it is controlled in grids, forms, details, rhythms, orchestrations, consonances, complementarities. Regarding research theatre, after a long work on body and organic action in the space, that already contains itself some work on improvisation, we include a spoken or a sung text, with the purpose to come to the complete form, which, to be alive, needs a support that gives life to previously improvised material (1).

Once in Milan, at Brera Academy, I watched a performance by Dario Fo,  “reading” some of his paints, turning his watercolours on a reading desk and telling stories in his hilarious tone. Dario’s sole way of acting is always plaied on a certain improvisation level, but it is supported and determined by the highly detailed picture, like the Louis Armstrong score.

Let’s finish those short considerations on improvisation, reminding another famous Armstrong’s passage “Skip the Gutter”, that includes an unforgettable duet with  Hines, at the same time a logical and surprisingly varied dialogue, so described by our musicologist: “The formal schedule is divided in the following scheme

 

Hines starts with a two beats phrase on the verge of the double time; Armstrong replies letting the tension out in a true double time. Then, Hines settles in a relaxed music, made by tercets and full of swing, which Armstrong perfectly imitates, even if choosing totally different notes, but in a complementary way. Knowing that Armstrong will not imitate him in the six following beats, Hines launches into a two beats piano rush, which would not have sense for the trumpet. Then, he calms down and performs a trumpet suitable passage, that meets Armstrong on the way, so that Louis could finish the phrase (Hines six beats and the sixteen beats chorus, as well). Louis replies with a single note, that is repeated with a marvellous swing, full of double bearings and accents crossed with tercets. As soon as Louis finishes, Hines enters with an arpeggio, surprisingly starting on the fourth time, so that he looks to have jumped a movement” (G.Schuller, pag 163)

The precision of this musical description is comparable to the theatrical piece “The Brid”, so masterfully performed that it looks perfectly improvised, but really so detailed and specified that it gives small-large room to the sound-movement-space execution variations of the Living Theatre.

The quality and the exact respect of action give a fully present body-mind to actor scenic presence, allowing a complete freedom in which the magic of improvisation happens, that is the respect of  the silences, the right rhythm of the action and the following cue, in other words the whole performative profile.

Walter Orioli

 

(1) Let’s suppose that, in the initial improvisation, a more or less traumatic memory, partly processed by the person, comes out. In the final formalization, such a memory is no longer perceived as an inner but as an acted event, transformed in a performative form. In its extreme refinement, improvisation keeps the actor alive, because artist: to be true in the fiction, to be present in the absence from the real world.