Month: July 2015

My blog ‘Idle Thoughts’ can be accessed through the following link:

jfjacquesblog.blogspot.co.uk

I will be facilitating two explorative and creative workshops at two different conferences in September 2015.

The first workshop is entitled ‘Intersubjectivity and Metaxis in Performance in Dramatherapy’ and will be part of the Annual Conference of the British Association of Dramatherapists on the 5th, 6th and 7th September 2015. Details can be found on the BADth website.

The second workshop is entitled ‘Six Characters in Search of an Audience: the Role and Function of the Audience in Dramatherapy’ and will be offered as part of the 13th European Arts Therapies Conference between the 16th and 19th September in Palermo (Sicily). Details can be found on the ECArTE website.

This experiential workshop will explore the place, role and function of the audience in the particular context of performance-based dramatherapy whereby the self of the performer comes into direct contact with the other of the spectator. This workshop will aim at exploring the way in which the production of meaning in performance-based dramatherapy can be described as emerging from a relational and embodied encounter between performer and witness within the shared space of performance. This workshop will explore the idea of dialogue in performance as well as encouraging a reflection on the notion of otherness in performance.

In a tribute to the Sicilian author Luigi Pirandello, this workshop will be based on a creative exploration of the play Six Characters in Search of an Author. It will explore the notion of authorship and agency in performance in the context of the performer-audience relationship and the way in which, following ideas developed by Pitruzzella and Wilshire, the audience becomes an agent of authorization. As such it will consider the role and position of the other in the act of creation and production of the art event.

The workshop will explore the dialogic relationship between performer and audience whereby the outsideness of the other provides, according to the Russian philosopher and linguist Mikhail Bakhtin, an ‘excess of seeing’ and becomes as a result a condition for knowledge, understanding, and the creation of personal identity and meaning. This workshop will suggest that the encounter between self and other in the liminal space of performance creates, in the words of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, a ‘surplus of meaning’ that reflects a relational understanding of performance and identity.