This experiential workshop-lecture is aimed at educators and psychologists who want to add a few practical and simple approaches from the art of acting to their professional toolkit and who are interested in widening their students’ and clients’ options by offering them useful and easily understandable approaches for a better self-image.
Acting has long been used as a means for furthering personal growth in school drama clubs, drama therapy etc. In this context it is often conceptualized as a means for “self-expression”. This conceptualization makes hidden claims that should be questioned. The “self” is here considered as something that already “is” and that would only have to be turned inside-out to become visible. This claim postulates the self as something stable that, by its stability would also somewhat control the environment as all events would have to be measured in relation to this measuring-stick like stable self. It can be assumed that this conceptualization might offer some advantages in favour of uncertainty reduction for an action to come. But under closer examination it remains unclear by what parameters an inner state felt as a “self” should find its equivalent in an “expressed” specific line of action in an environment. A claim that a line of action actually represents the self can be neither confirmed nor falsified. The conceptualization becomes even more questionable as soon as the environment is another human being with another supposed “self”, by claim as stable as the first one. Insistance on the self-expression concept runs the danger of interpreting all not optimally fitting reactions of the other human agent as an unwelcome intervention that hinders the expression of the own self. And by the insistence on the right of self-expression of the first, the right for self-expression of the second will be curtailed. That is why the self-expression concept can not work, offers no concept for the feedback-driven negotiation that would have to be undertaken, actually puts brakes on discovering the possibilities of human-to-human interaction and quickly resluts in top-down regulation of human-to-human interaction and in imposition of rigid behavioural rules that then, against all original intent, cut the behavioural range of freedom down to a minimum.
This workshop leaves the self-expression conceptualization behind but expressly acknowledges the grasp for uncertainty reduction that is cautiously assumed to lie beneath it. It guides the participants along the orienting lines of a process-focused conceptualization of the human. This conceptualization considers the self as something that we can not control, but that will bit after bit emerge along a line of actions which, on the contrary, can be monitored, controlled, modified and adapted by skills that can themselves also be improved. The self-organization along the line of actions leads us into the unknown as explorers, not only into the unknown environment but alongside with that also into our still unknown, not-yet-there selves of all future moments. Along a line of action, unforeseeables become what one can learn to expect and deal with. That way the uncertainty of the outcome of human-to-human interaction can become a curiosity stimulating exploratory realm for discovering possibilities.