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Stage for Dr Jacob Moreno’s psychodrama is a material construction designed so that realities, truth and soul are able to be opened, faced and known for what they are. Reality is what is both ordinarily lived in a slice of life plus all that is and all that can be – beyond the readily recognized realities. Reality is what we experience and enact in everyday living. On the psychodrama stage it can be enacted true and raw from both subjective and objective viewpoints. Moreno identifies five instruments for psychodrama production: the first instrument is Stage. Stage is then that particular place and setting where things actually happen just the way they do. Stage for psychodrama is that place set out for life experiences to be enacted with reality, truth and endless potential for new and expansive experience. Each construction, whether by our thinking about how things happen as they do, or whether by construction of a theatrical stage with measures taken for staging and production, informs the understanding of the other.

Psychodrama happens where a person gathers with others in a half circle around a space that becomes a stage for enactments and with a leader trained in psychodrama production may be the one to bring their story to life. Jacob Moreno created Psychodrama.

Moreno’s saw the “stage” as his first of five instruments, and he saw “reality” as third of four universals. Psychodrama aims to produces the reality of a person’s life – What has been, what is current and what yet may be. The stage can contain it all and dramatize it reveal the essential reality. The creativity of everyone is brought together to be true to what is. Companians as audience are ready to be assistant actors. It is not only the future that is exploratory and open to new possibilities. Past and current life is explored, expanded and there is freedom to experiment with any alternative – nothing is ruled out.

The actor who begins follows their life’s narrative and is the protagonist, the audience member who comes from amongst the audience so that everyone considers in action and interaction how things work in their lives. One story links to all stories. One life has commonalities in theme and dreams to all others. The lead actor is the source of data consciously and unconscious. They are playwright, script writer, producer, as a psychodrama proceeds they play the auxiliary egos of their life story. Their narrative brings forward their subjective and objective reality and their surplus reality.

I havebeen trying to recall a word I used to use in latter stages of role training. I remembered the word today that was eluding me. It’s “chunking”. From NLP I think and behavioural therapy in the seventies may be. I used it to have groups of men to “Harness Anger and Stop Violence”. In role training coaching as they took up the new role (or drew on an old role in a new context) “chunking” was the word that I used to name the irritating process of pausing them and describing in detail how they had enacted that chunk. They were quickly willing to have each chunk, a success story. Going a small piece at a time as the role is being integrated/developed I suppose assisted the role to be well formed and mindfully appreciated. It is a point in the development of role where role taking freedom is moving up to the next level of freedom (spontaneity) to begin to be role played. This level being about easy flow it is strange to break the flow into bits (chunks) which logically interrupts the flow. How it works doesn’t matter. It certainly does. I first witnessed this in Max Clayton’s work he didn’t comment on what or why he did it. The effect was obvious. He didn’t call it chunking. Leaning theorists might say each successful element is being reinforced. Paradoxical therapists could say that the interruptions are resistances that have the CNS work harder to bind the parts into a whole that is seamless maybe.

A prose-poem Not Rehearsal

In 1985 the five day Training Workshop ends. The trainer’s saying that “psychodrama is rehearsal for life” clashed with the vitality and immediacy of my experience. I went home and wrote a prose poem. I knew what it was for me. It was not rehearsal. Knowing what it is not for ourselves can begin our knowing of our own truth – a truth to a “self chosen path”.

Thinking further on reciprocity and groups, and reciprocity’s advantages and may be necessity for worthwhile, ethical and powerfully efficacious healthy developments, I have been remembering Jacob Moreno in his “sociometry” based “group psychotherapy”. He was “Doctor”, and “Doctor” was an identity of powerful influence, respect and status in the years of his lifetime (1889 – 1974).  In his groups he had everyone be “Doctor” and address each other that way. He knew they were the therapeutic agents to each other and that reciprocity is a community dynamic for health.

Barrack Obama in his first news conference as United States President Elect makes a couple of light remarks. One about the White House children’s dog selection. The other turning a titter at having said he had spoken to all past presidents. First he says “All living past Presidents”, then “I didn’t want to get into a Nancy Reagan thing”. Afterwards there were many things to deal with, tie up or follow up on. One has priority. He phones Nancy Reagan apologises and has an engaing and mutually satisfying conversation. A correspondent noted that it was not only flip it was innacurate. That former First Lady had consulted astrollogers. In fact the report continues it was First Lady Hilary Rodham Clinton who had spoken with the dead. A seance? no, not that. In a counselling consultation her therapist had guided her into a conversation between herself and her heroine First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

That may have been “guided imagery” or it might be “psychodrama”. In psychodrama the space that becomes the stage where encounters occur whether a space in our minds for creative imagery or a space cleared on a floor, within which to stand and be “self” and then to cross the floor turn and speak for and as “the other”. Active body movements and speaking free-flow out loud can release what we don’t know we know inside, and have us discover what we otherwise will fail to recognise.

Not then seances, but stars and planets for one, and being a star in her own psychodrama with her hero in “surplus reality” for the other. Hilary Clinton is not with a medium but a therapeutic guide facilitaing a warming her up to herself and her vision of her hero, her dreams and her own aspirations.  The psychodrama producer is a companion watching for the body cues that a person themselves wil not see so that Hilary or any client can be alive to them and gain motivation and confident flow towards making her goals a reality in her life. Psychodrama is not weired or spooky and nothing to do with letting all hell rise up and run loose. Psychodrama is about meeting and integrating ones own truths.

“Role” is a word that Jacob Levi Moreno took from his theatre experience and his fascination with staging, producing and creative acts. He coached children in freedom to be themselves in Vienese parks while first a philosophy and then a medical student. He created impromptu theatre with teenagers and Vienese actors. He produced theatre early last century as a newspaper in action. He explored stage craft and stage design devising stages that embraced and wove their way through an audience. He was challenged by the encounter of catharsis as the audience is moved and changed by the dramatic warm up and the human truth that is soul opening as each actor enters, plays and creates the role they have in a dramatic slice of life.

Having migrated to the United States in 1928 Dr Moreno psychiatrist wanted word “role” to carry a wider meaning that fitted the reality of the “stage” of life where women,  men and their children are the players. Players not of parts prescribed, or with lines contrived, but acting authentically in the reality of what is.

There are real social pressures and restrictions on each of us. There are also creative realities that arise in each of us. Our creative realities are constructed by our wilful, mindful and self chosen paths built on our visions, our hopes, our dreams together with our spontaneity to to be ourselves and act freely for ourselves as ethical and inclusive beings.

Role for followers of Morneno’s experimental enquiry is a dynamic concept to discover who we humans are and how we operate within ourselves and in community. Moreno recognised the societal moulding and structuring of our various places and responsibilities within any community. He saw that social apsects of “role” are how we develop to be who we are. He saw our personal individual life learning to become who we can be involving taking up role positions enacting the requirements and adding in our way of being to gradually learn to be who we are becoming. The self he said arises from the roles we bring to life, rather than that the roles emerge from or are constructed by the self. The self - our individual personality – is not a pre-existent entity. We act and therefore we are. We produce roles as we interact and encounter the worlds realities day by day and minute by minute and we in that create ourselves. Others play there parts with us as co producers in their power over our path taking. We ourselves co produce the interactions within the power differentials of our shared cultures of the smal or wider systems in which we are set. Original family is majorly influential. However so too is our dreaming, our imaginations, our wishes, desires, our humour and our fearfullness and our indomitable spirit.

My next blog turns from the familiar social cultural aspects of role to an aspect Moreno recognised had not been recognised and deserved to be seen not only as an aspect but as the foundational reality of “role”.

 A group of psychodrama trainees, a colleague and I recently explored Jacob Moreno’s Canon of Creativity. During the weekend the question came what is a “canon”. It is a rule or law. A law by decree a gathering together of religious rules, principles and precepts can be called a canon. The canon may however be a natural and repeated pattern of events or phenomena that are able to be recognized and expected because of their consistency. The relationship of warm up, spontaneity, creativity and conserve are seen by Moreno as a canon that can be described and pictured.

A clue from Moreno

4 Components & 2 Interactive Factors

The first clue is about there being thinking, feeling and action in every and any role.

Second in the graphic that follows there are three additional factors alongside and essential to a concept that role has thinking, feeling and action. They are that:

a. values arise from interactions of thinking and feeling;

b. every enactment of role is influenced by and in part limited by context;

c. every enactment of role has consequences that can be imagined in advance – though are never absolutely predictable.

Click for Larger Image

Four components and two interactive factors of role

Spontaneity is the freedom to be each of us ourselves. To be freer and freer to be who I am or you are and for us to become who we really can be.

I want to be truly myself. Spontaneity is the factor in us that releases that freedom. Healthy spontaneity is mindfully directed and ethically controlled. It is lovingly gifted to the health of the whole human community. The planet’s interest is served and we are co-creators of the cosmos. A dynamic holistic system where we each are a particular and unique self with our own way of being is never able to be separated or absolutely isolated.

Here is a paper first produced September 2004 for Trainees working with Role Dynamics. Only to be copied with permission and acknowledgment. It is a work in progress with revisions and additions on going. Words highlighted in italics are to keep myself conscious of J & Z Moreno. Words in common use within ANZPA Inc. communities are underlined.

I am Myself and I want to be Me