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THEATRE THERAPY - WHAT IS IT |
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Therapy is not healing, is treatment. Theatre is not fiction, is truth. Theatre-therapy is treatment through the truth of theatre. Everyone have something to be treated for, everyone have a truth to tell.
by
Cristina Ruscica
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Theatre-therapy acts on different situations with purpose of prevention, rehabilitation and treatment of some psychic trouble. It often works in places like institutions, centres, associations but also on the street, in woods or by sea.
The theatre-therapy is a kind of artistic group therapy nowadays more widespread and know on a large scale.
During the last few years a group of psychologists and theatricals have worked out in Italy and in foreign countries an original approach to the therapy that merge psychological theories with artisan praxis of staging.
Theatre-therapy is the mise-en-scčne inside a group of one’s own experienced with the support of some scenic presence principles coming from actors art. This kind of therapy implies the teaching of how to feel the five senses and how to perceive one’s own body and vocal movement; it works by performing non every day characters (generally improvised) and it requires a thorough pre-expressive work.
The aim of the theatre-therapy session is to harmonize the link between body, voice, mind, in relationship with the others, oneself and one’s own interpretative creativity.
The effects of the group sessions keep on producing results on the individual even after the sitting, because the incentives received are part of a deep experience that the individual can bring in his every day life.
The Theatre-therapy does not identify a diagnosis or a psychological interpretation, it reinforces instead new visions of the self. Therefore this therapy can not take the place of psychotherapeutic treatment but they collaborate to achieve more conscience of the self.
The method is based on the Authenticity of stage fiction in relation with the deepest self.
Another development of the method has come from the conjunction with the Art of perception.
ARTIST – ACTOR - PATIENT
Historical outlines
What happens in the magic (or disappointing) moment in which someone gives birth to a character and tries to involve the audience, to drag the audience in another emotional universe?
For ages the question was solved by relying on the myth of naturalness: “the actor has to identify himself with the passions that he represents, only in this way he will be effective”. The formulation of this statement is very old; Orazio wrote: “it is not enough that poetry is fine, it has to be sweet and it has to drag the heart of the audience where it wants”. He wrote to the actors: “human beings laugh with the one who laughs and they cry with the one who cries. If you want me to cry, you have to suffer first: then your pain will touch me; but if you do your part badly, I will fall asleep or I will laugh”.
For ages the idea of reflection, of natural mimesis dominates: the actor tries to fell the emotions that the text suggests, so he can express the feelings in the way that they can reach the audience.
Diderot (1713-1784), French writer and philosopher, was the first to swim against the current by supporting the opposite thesis: “the actor – said Diderot in his critical essay Paradoxe sur le comedien (published only in 1830) – is really great only when he stay still, without sensitiveness, and when he directs his body as the puppet showman does with his puppet”.
The actor becomes superior, not only respect the natural man, but also respect the character sketched in the text. The theatrical text is like a kind of automaton. It is transformed by the actor into something new. The emotional detachment and the artifice become the fundamental ingredients of what we call art.
Another turning moment in the direction of modernity is generally recognized in the system conceived by Kostantin Stanislavskij (1863-1938): it is a method that had exerted all his influence on the theatrical experiences of the avant-garde. It means a real journey that involves body, mind and the ethics of being an actor. The main idea is to mould the mind working on the actor’s psychological universe in order to awake his creative dimension that will bring new force to his actions and to his body attitude.
Stanislavskij’s method forecasts a training thanks to which the actor acts as intermediary between the theatrical text and the audience. This can be possible thanks to the actor’s ability to create with the images of fantasy. Images that by one side are inspired by the text and suggested by the author bur by the other side are nourished on an intensive personal work done by the actor himself. “Keep on paying your attention to the images that are in front of the eyes of your mind” said Stanislavskij referring to how the actor should prepare a particular scene. “Figure out thoughts and fantasy images according to the text and to the opportunities given by author and director. But since you gave birth to both thoughts and images from your heart, the words - and the truth that you will put in this words as they will be your life – will be melted into your imagination and into the scene”. (Creative actor. Conversation at Bol’Soj Theatre, 1918-1922). It is a matter of putting into action a creative dimension of one’s memory “pushing on the fact that actor’s and director’s mind is a powerful force”.
In order to reinforce the creative strength – to find the hidden treasure and make it visible – it is necessary that the actor achieves enough discipline to tidy up his mind. This means reassemble thoughts and emotions and lead them into vivid and definite outlines in order to build images that will place into a clear interior space (what Stanislavskij called creative circle).
“An Indian wise man – Stanislavskij told to his students – had compared a human mind to a monkey … Now, said the wise man, make the monkey drink a glass of wine. Its movements will be like a top. Suppose again that this drunk monkey will be stung by a scorpion, it will be like the men undisciplined mind. Even if your mind is not so unruly, it will in any case be as a whirling wind. Give to a man a magic mirror in which he can see his thoughts: told, interrupted, and let fall again as a miscarried ship. Pieces, chips oh broken masts, nails put out from floating boxes, men crowded on lifeboats, scraps, scattered clothes and so on. The thoughts of a beginner look like all this. A beginner does not know how to keep paying attention and how to fixed his attention completely on a single object”.
Let’s see an example of how an actor can reassemble the interior images into vivid images able to communicate the beauty of art and able to remain impressed into audience’s memory. “When I have played the role of Stockmann (a character of The folk enemy by Ibsen) – said Stanislavskij – with the help of intuition, I created Stockmann’s external look that come naturally from the interior man. Stockmann’s and Stanislavskij’s body and soul blend each other into one figure. I have had only to think about Stockmann’s troubles and expectations and immediately appeared his myopia, his bowed ahead body and his hurried walk. My first and my second finger pushed forward as they wanted to put my feelings, words and thoughts into the soul of the man who I was talking with”.
The words in the text is been translated into interior images that have a double function of making the audience remember the text and of translating it into corporeal images vivid and effective. We are in the presence of a kind of theatrical physiognomic where the bodily features and the moral and psychological qualities is been immediately translated the ones into the others.
A further contribution to the research of the stage truth comes from Artaud that revives the word through the carnal figure of the actor. The attention is now on the action, the meeting of corporeal inwardness with communication. In the physical and emotional action – through the improvisation process - there is not manipulation nor fiction, there is not building of artifice. The theatre of artificial passions is abolished in favour of a creative process that is described in the following stages:
1. Free improvisation
2. Action definition
3. Application of the text to the action.
The assembling happens like a film where in the second stage the images are printed and in the third stage the sound is impressed. Then the different sequences are cut and pasted. This method comes from the Odin Theatre of Eugenio Barba.
Now let’s talk about the therapeutics function of the theatre.
In the first stage the actor is free to express his creativity. He shows his scission level between who is he and who he would like to be. This scission must be awarded, otherwise the creativity will be destroyed. Neumann in his book “The creative man and the transformation” explains that the creative experience can not exist in relation with the overcoming of the scission done by the conscience and with the discovery of the original reality, because the creative experience is in continual evolution.
Improvising a scene the actor comes in touch with his original reality, his deeper Self, but he can not take it or fix it because the actor is in constant transformation. He can, through the temporary scission of his personality, see the other image and suit it to the stage action.
In this way the character shows to the audience the reflex of the Self of the actor, of his original reality the one that is true.
The scission, the missing loyalty to the every day Self - when it is represented in the stage improvisation – is like another self, like a twisting of something still. This is the base of every drama script.
The interior scission of the actor’s Ego shows aspects that go beyond his individuality to enclose the collective contents of human experience.
In order to have a good emotional impact on the audience, the “mystery”, that the actor expresses, has to stay so. If the mystery stay so, the audience could – as consequence – have a vision of the never seen before.
The theatre plays an important function in the west, it reflects the Ego of a man that for a psychological constitution is obliged to a multiple personality divided into many characters to be played.
The scission is become to the western Ego a function, a physiological service no more occasional. “The western Ego does not have any memory about the birth of scission as defensive dynamics (a psychic reaction in order to evade an external danger). The Ego conceives the scission as a permanent rule”.
In the Italian treatise of psychology, at the chapter titled “The modification of the conscience”, is written: the characteristic of normal conscience condition is the ability of scission between one observant Ego and one observed Ego above all as regards the reconstruction of temporal sequences of events on the basis of which the personal identity is been built.
A. Kleinman is clear with regard to this point: “… every man in the modern West suffer from a dissociation of sensitiveness. This dissociation put him in a situation that makes him change his placing and pass with some difficulties from participate to life emotionally, to adopt an attitude that brings him above and out from the system in which he his involved… The rational power of modern and secular West has determined and intensified the building of a interior critical observer that looks and comments the experience itself”. This interior critical observer is like a strength Super-Ego that judges actions and intentions (see: The theatre of normality, Orioli, 1996).
The conscience dissociation of sensitiveness and the formation of a interior critical observer can be faced in theatre where the subject is continually put in contact with the emotional corps. In theatre the actor explores the missing unity with himself through the work on mind-body-action.
The question of stage truth is been raised by Stanislavskij, but it is Grotowski that through a hard research on the vocal and corporeal comes to the definition of the stage action as the pure quality of the real Self. Since the beginning the research of Grotowski, Polish director, rotate around Stanislavskij’s idea that, in the earliest 900s, searches the way of stage truth through an excavation into the emotional memory of the actor. But what interests the most the Polish director is the last definition of “work of the actor on himself”. For the analysis of the physical actions the interpreter do not reevoke a pure emotion inside him, otherwise try to understand what physical effect the emotionality has and how the interior movement is transcribed in the gesture and in the attitude trying to redefine the physical movement from the interior. With Grotowski the research moves on the non necessity of a external comparison between in order to dedicate the maximum importance to the internal comparison without an additional fiction element.
In this way the process makes a inverse trajectory coming back to the myth and revealing the archaic signs of the inner culture as an ancestral graffito that is engraved in the actor’s conscience.
Grotowski has not left a method as Stanislavskij had, but he has left a way of research, a process. Even in our days, attending the demonstrations of his work in his Research Centre in Ponterosa (Pisa), it is astonishing how these young actors communicate to the audience not a text nor something like a show but pure energy.
A theatrical critic wrote: “It is made up between these actors a complex universe of spatial and figurative relationships that draw up emotional and internal routes. In this way the six communicate to each other through a defined score. What remains to us is the strong sign of the power that these actors transmit to each other and that they communicate to the audience. This power is not an emotional outburst of a temporary communication but it is built on an artisan work on the most elementary means of the Self perception and on the transfer of these means in voice and gesture”.
Here what could happen in the magic moment when someone gives birth to a character trying to get himself and his own emotional universe involved: “I let the internal earthquake happen: I stopped defend myself, I gave up to have the control, I let the past fall down. I want to be, show what I show, say what I say”.
In these few statements taken from the diary of one of our students of Theatre-therapy, there is not any trace of scission or identification. There is only the being conscious of being who one’s is.
Picking up the heritage of Stanislavskij for what concern the mind discipline, the physical actions of Diderot about the estranged, the cruelty theatre of Artaud, the research process of Grotowski and the mise-en-scčne of Barba we have a good net in which fishing the results of many years of studies on the actor’s work. An essential introduction to create a theatre that could cure and nourish our soul.
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