As a facilitator, I am starting to learn to be able to use whatever energy I bring into the session, be that angry, apathy, lighthearted, downcast, troubled...
I also try to encourage others in the group to use whatever energy that they bring into the session. There is no bad energy. There is energy that blocks us, energy that we get confused by, frightened by, energy that releases us, energy that drives us. I call energy that we can use "energy", and energy that we can't use (or rather haven't learned to use yet) "difficult energy" ...
Starting the session with something personal, such as 'the most interesting thing that happened to me today', brings our personal emotional responses to the session. These emotional responses are the expression of our energy, whether this mostly expressed inwardly, by the physiological experiences we have - churning stomach, racing heart, inertia, or the opposite, restless agitation, or mostly expressed outwardly - e.g., by our non verbal communication - how loud do we speak? how much eye contact are we making? Is our posture open to the group or are we physically closed off and guarded? Language wise, we may be critical of others, or eager to please, we may mumble our words, or enunciate clearly. Do we sing when we speak or do we have a dull, flat monotone? Difficult energy - maybe sadness,or fear, might block communication, as well as our ability to be creative and expressive. This happens when we are trying to work against how we feel, for instance, surviving a day at work whilst in grief, we try to mask our feelings, or block them out of existence, in order to survive the social and practical demands of the day. This is exhausting and debilitating.
Drama, the way that we do it, aims to release some of this energy. Allows emotion and all the expressions that go along with it. Fear, death, love, craving, conflict ... all of these things can be acted out. Now the barriers to expression are lifted, we have permission to be how we feel. Unfortunately, days, weeks, months and years of denying ourselves this inner liberation, mean that we have great difficulty in allowing ourselves, we feel we cannot create, or express, sometimes we have convinced ourselves we do not feel, or we have replaced one emotional response with another, the result being a conflictual, unconvincing presentation that confuses, angers or bores our audience. So in the workshops that we do, we work with transformation and personal experience, in order to become more aware of our own inner experience, and our outward presentation, taking ownership of ourselves and becoming more comfortable in our expression.
This also results in some really good drama.
In turns, we sculpted the group into a picture, that represented some element of our personal experience. Having done this, we told a story, a snippet of a story that was represented by the picture. Each character devised a movement and sound for their improvisational motif. Then, the creator said "3-2-1-Action!" And the scene came to life.
As the scene was described, in the positions of the sculpt, the actors began to have some inner experience of their role within the story. When they devised their motif, they imagined ways that they could describe, physically, their inner experience, as well as move the plot of the story.
After some time, the creator would shout "Freeze!" or "It's a wrap!", and the characters would once again become statues. the creator would then take the position of one of the statues, releasing this person to be the next creator.
However this time, the new creator did not make a new sculpt... They would interpret the existing sculpt in a new way, and describe the new story, and the new characters that it contained. Whilst this re-creation was occuring, the actors would, in thier frozen state, respond inwardly to their new role, and whilst these physiological changes were occuring, they would use this emotive response, and the cognitive element of "knowing the story", in the decisions that they made in producing their next motif.
There were many themes explored during the session, conflict, monsters, the mob, crime, nature. These are common themes for our current group to engage in. We have 2 more weeks left of this terms work. All the sessions have been improvisations based on the notions of birth, death and transformation or evolution. From January we will start thinking about our next performance, the theme of this will probably be horror. Who knows? Only time will tell.
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