Life’s a Drama!’
by Kemlyn
I’ve just arrived home after my first class at Quest Theatre’s ‘Wellbeing Through Drama’ workshop in Bromley, and I have to say I had an AMAZING time!
The organisers and other attendees were all very welcoming and friendly, and the theatrical exercises and games we did were both very fun and potentially very useful for me, from a therapeutic standpoint.
I am diagnosed with a Personality Disorder, which (among other things!) involves me experiencing something known as ‘identity diffusion’. This effectively means that I have an incoherent or inconsistent sense of ‘self’. I can literally feel and act like ‘a different person’ from one situation to the next; and when at its most extreme, I can experience dramatic (no pun intended! LOL) and rapid shifts, which can leave both other people and myself confused and unsure of what’s going on.
This has left me unable to maintain close social contacts (outside of my long-time and long-suffering girlfriend, I have no friends or family), and I’ve never kept a job for a very long time.
The worst thing though is that I actually EXPERIENCE each of those different, shifting ‘selves’ as a unique and separate ‘world’. So, at times the world is magical (with me at the centre of that magic) and full of promise, but unfortunately, the world is more often cruel and threatening, or frequently just bleak and empty of any life or meaning.
Everyone has different moods which affect the way they see things, but my shifts are absolute, can occur in seconds, and result in dramatically (there’s that pun, again! LOL) different experiences for me, and inconsistent behaviours and attitudes towards others.
I literally can be different ‘selves’, and experience different ‘worlds’, from situation to situation, and even moment to moment…
Acting, I hope, can help me to start to explore and experiment with how I see and engage with the world and others, and offer me an effective outlet to channel my energy CREATIVELY.
This is where Quest Theatre’s ‘Wellbeing Through Drama’ classes come in! These aim to provide a safe space for anyone at all to come along and connect via theatrical play/playful theatre (my own words!), and then get together for an inclusive and supportive group chat and coffee at the end. The session, as I’ve said, was great FUN, but also- from my own perspective- was very INTERESTING and potentially USEFUL in a therapeutic sense. I really believe that art of any kind can help us (whether we consider ourselves ‘mentally ill’ or not) to understand ourselves and the world around us (including other people- which is my main issue!) much better.
To this end, the theatrical games and exercises in the class followed clear themes, which were explained to us in a simple manner, before letting us explore them however we felt inspired to do so. At any time people can take a break from the session, if they feel like it. Nothing is forced or expected of anyone, and mutual respect and support is promoted and offered at all times. The environment is nurturing, encouraging and VERY enthusiastic!
The overall theme for today was ‘IMPROVISATION’ (inspired by the eccentric but highly-acclaimed Keith Johnstone). Johnstone has taught that to engage fully with human life, with its unpredictable and changing rhythms and colours, requires us to improvise, and that the theatre can be a laboratory or playground within which to practice this. We all have to ‘act’ to get by in human life, and what fun is it to have only two or three characters or routines to live within (just our work self, private self, social self, etc…), when there are ENDLESS characters and routines we can potentially explore and inhabit: INFINITIVE ‘selves’ and ‘worlds’ we can experience; right here, and right now!!!
I’d love to go deeper into the specific ideas we were shown today, and the theatrical games we played to bring these ideas to life, but my little review here is getting long enough already, and anyway, if you’re interested enough to read this far and want to know more- THEN THE ONLY THING TO DO IS TO GET ALONG TO ONE OF QUEST THEATRE’S ‘WELLBEING THROUGH DRAMA’ CLASSES, JOIN IN THE FUN, AND SEE WHO (OR WHAT!) YOU HAVE THE POTENTIAL TO BECOME…!!!
