Therapeutic theater: definition and benefits

Since ancient times, human beings have come together to celebrate and share the stories passed down by our ancestors.

The Theater has its origin in the first sacred rituals, and its tribal nature has always functioned as a cohesive of the community, transmitting myths from generation to generation, and allowing individuals to enter a space where they can express themselves freely and digest their most repressed emotions, through the emotions experienced by the actors, the viewers travel the emotions own. In the Theater there is no remote control, it is an experience of deep contact that occurs in the present moment.

In order to play theater we need other actresses / actors and the public, if you feel lonely and isolated in this society every Once more "digitized", a theater group is a way to relate and develop your skills social.

If you are interested in learning more about this topic, keep reading, because in this Psychology-Online article we explain the definition and benefits of therapeutic theater.

The Theater is a great self-awareness tool because it helps us to realize what we really feel, thanks to the decriminalization that the theatrical experience entails, by Identify ourselves with "The Villain", or with "The Hero" when he finally gets revenge from him, we also contact our villain and our inner hero.

“Playing someone else” connects us with parts of ourselves that we may have completely denied, and sometimes it's very funny, when we integrate what we have represented in a workshop, as we insist on emphasizing: “I am not like that, I have done this because it was Theater"
It is difficult for us to recognize our creative talent, and accept that after all it is always oneself who has created the character. For this reason, the Theater allows us to understand how we create the roles with which we identify ourselves and how in the end we end up confusing our real identity with the role we play.

We can draw a parallel between the socialization process, which ends up shaping our personality when we are children, and as an actor can learn a "character" that is written in a text, in some way, a good actor has than defending his character, thinking as he thinks, feeling what he feels, desiring what the character desires... and above all, he needs to believe the role to make it credible to others.

The same happens in everyday life, unconsciously we know that there is no better strategy to convince others of our wishes. character, than to convince ourselves first, and this works very well in society, the problem is that we forget our true nature, by identifying excessively with the neurotic desires that we are determined to achieve, believing that if we satisfy them we will achieve the happiness.

On the art of acting and in the art of living managing to establish the right distance between the character and the actor, or between the personality and the deep self, is a challenge.
Acting teachers say that if you are too far from the character you represent, you do not have the strength to act it, but if you become too attached either, because you lack the necessary distance not to be confused with the character.

In the same way it happens in everyday life with our ego, which is nothing more than a character learned in childhood, and which was necessary for our survival in that environment, But if we believe it too much, in adulthood it becomes an obvious limitation, since we are not able to see the world in all its breadth, and we find ourselves imprisoned in a conditioning system, both at a cognitive, emotional, and motor level, which makes us mere stimulus / response machines within a play with a fairly scripted poor.

Why do we say that the script of the work in which we are immersed and defend tooth and nail is quite poor? Simply by the fact that it is a borrowed script, it is a script that we have learned from our parents, and from their environment, and that they, in turn, learned it from their parents... thus in an immemorial chain, all of it, immersed in a civilization, which in its eagerness to socialize and domesticate, has not been very respectful of the creativity and health of our inner child.

Obviously, there are wonderful things that we have learned from our parents, and from our environment, adulthood can be an opportunity to digest them and rescue them... to separate the wheat from the chaff, and see which aspects of the learned script are nutritious and desirable, and which are mere residues of a past "in automatic".

Therapeutic Theater is an excellent tool to explore new characters, so far little known in our usual limited repertoire, as it creates a safe environment, in which we are allowed dare to experiment new roles, without dangerously exposing ourselves to unwanted responses from our social environment.

For example, we can represent a scene in which we tell our boss that he seems like a bore to us, expressing everything that we would love to be able to say to him, without risk being fired... or we can explore our capacity for seduction, or fear of ridicule, creating scenes to investigate these issues, without taking risks unnecessary.

Ultimately, it is about conquering greater expressive freedom, since the characters we represent in this space do not have to be logical, real, or reasonable, they simply gives us an opportunity to be someone else, a chance to stop compulsively acting the "known role", and enter a different way of thinking, acting, and feel.

If you ask an adult the question, did you feel freer as a child or now? Perhaps the answer will surprise us and we will find that despite the autonomy that he now has, he felt freer when he was a child. So what happened? It turns out that as we grow we become wiser, yes, but we also close ourselves more and instead of becoming freer beings we end up being prisoners of our own inner being and we end up showing others a public person who, at times, differs a lot from who we really are inside.

Shame, insecurity, guilt, peer pressure, expectations, fear of rejection or ridicule, intolerance to frustration, among other things condition the lives of many people and in the long run end up causing major psychological problems (anxiety, depression, social skills problems, etc.).

¿What is the function of therapeutic theater so? How can you help people feel a little more free?

Virginia Satir (1916 - 1988)

An excellent American family therapist, she claimed that anyone always has new things about themselves that you may not have discovered yet and playing at being others, doing theater, we can be surprised by ourselves themselves. Satir used the theater in family therapy, for example, in his technique of the 'Body Sculptures' to see the role that each member of the family plays. Through the arrangement of the sculptures (family members) you can see who is related to who in the family group or the emotional distance between the members among other aspects of the dynamics family.

Augusto Boal (1931 - 2009)

Playwright, theater director and above all a great cultural activist was another author who turned to theater as a tool to improve the quality of life of special populations or those at risk of social exclusion and stated that when a person is exposed on stage to show his reality of things and on stage he modifies that reality at will, he returns to his life daily changed. Although that change has not really happened in his life, the mere fact of having exposed it has been an inner transformative activator.

In psychotherapy, psychodrama is used, developed by the psychiatrist Jacob Levy Moreno (1889 - 1975) in order that patients not only tell their problems but also act on your problems at that very moment through dramatic representations of their own conflicts, representing for example encounters with people not present who are part of the internal concerns of the patient himself, about what these absent ones may be thinking or feeling, we talk about an imagined possible future or, for example, what we could not say at a given moment and what we say in session.

In short, therapeutic theater is a facilitating tool for self-knowledge personal and therefore, for psychological and social development. There is no doubt about the curative benefits that we can obtain from the theater and that the Therapeutic Theater workshops want to encourage through playful-practical exercises based on games, improvisations, humor, or the creation of conflicts to be able to influence the mental and emotional processes and thus facilitate the search for self-knowledge and very importantly, the search for that freedom so longed for.