Toward a Shamanic Theatre of Being

As a poet/playwright, I have been developing various forms of theatre as a way of processing individual and collective conflict. This work was initially inspired by my experience in an introductory process work workshop led by Amy and Amy Mindell in July 1988, when an unexpected group conflict surfaced. I was shaking in fear at the heated words and the potential for physical violence. At the same time, I was also excited by the graceful calm in which Mindell and his colleagues seemed to dance from one side of the conflict to the other. At the peak of hostilities the angry initiator of the conflict welcomed Arny's change to his side with a kiss on the cheek. That playful kiss magically turned the anger on both sides into smiles and warm embraces.

I thought this group experience was more powerfully dramatic in its gradual development and spontaneous resolution than any play I had seen or written. I decided to learn whatever skills and tools I needed to do the same in my personal life and work as a writer. This paper reviews my work to date in adapting Process Work to the product-oriented field of Theatre, where the quality of performance is usually considered more important than personal growth and awareness.

I studied Process Work initially to tap the source of my own creativity and develop rich multi-dimensional characters in exciting well-written scripts. As I changed from being a solitary writer to being a performer and director collaborating with other artists to present my own work, the scripts also changed. I experimented with leaving space for actors to improvise their own dialogue, dance or music as integral parts of the written script. These experimental scripts in what

I call "Jazz Theatre" soon evolved into basic outlines to support my role as the "Storyteller," improvising the development and resolution of the dramatic conflict with other "actors" and the "audience." In the change from written to totally improvised, collaborative "scripts," my priorities shifted from rehearsed performances to personal and community development through a Theatre of Being.

My research is based on two working premises. The first is that everyone is a creative human being, co-creating with imaginary and real elements the culture in which we live. Imaginary elements include conscious and unconscious beliefs, values, dreams, memories, myths, visions, etc., which I regard as an unlimited human resource. Real elements, on the other hand, include both the natural and artificial landscape of the physical world with its tangible limits and boundaries. The second premise is that the theory, tools and skills of Process Work are as applicable to playwriting and dramatic presentations involving the public as they are to any group conflict.

Why theatre?

Conflict is the basis of dramatic structure in which one character, group or natural element is set in opposition to another. Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language defines drama as a "literary composition that tells a story usually about human conflict, by means of dialogue and action to be performed by actors." In conventional theatre, a dramatic play carries a conflict to resolution as the passive audience watches. Unlike the conflict resolution process I described earlier, the traditional play is rehearsed

and the script fine-tuned to create an illusion of spontaneous actions during the repeated performances. As a live presentation, theatre has the potential to incorporate both intentional and unintentional, spontaneous behavior into each performance. Social ritual/rite of passage

Western theatre originated in ancient Greece in the pagan festival of Dionysus, the god of wine and revelry. The festival celebrated a change from the sober work of everyday reality to uninhibited play. It became a community rite of passage from one state of mind to another where celebrants played music, sang, danced, recited poetry and myths, narrated local history, etc., much like modern community celebrations, festivals, and parades produced all over the world, from tribal dances in Africa to Carnival in Rio.

Theatre is a socially acceptable place for both actors and audience to enter and leave ordinary "reality" with a specific time limit. With its roots in a pagan religious festival, theatre is linked with supernatural, magical, and sacred experience—a special place and time set for a meeting between the sacred and profane.

Theatre may re-enact any life situation, create an imaginary world or play life games like "house'' or "cops and robbers." The element of play, i.e., pretending we are someone else while still being very much ourselves, releases the disavowed, disturbing voices of an individual or group and presents them in a way acceptable to the culture. Theatre offers an opportunity for the playwright, actors and audience to both put on and drop masks of power and privilege as well as their opposite—powerlessness—and process serious issues and conflicts in a creative and potentially enjoyable way. The playwright's process: creating with inner conflict

Writing plays is one of the ways I express what I am unable to in other parts of my life. The characters I create provide the roles to free the oppressed and socially unacceptable voices in myself, such as the easily hurt, frightened child. I imagine a world, the cast of characters inhabiting it, their problems and conflicts and the way toward each one's resolution. Completing a play is like facilitating a conflict between the minority and majority voices in myself; for example between the side that is frightened of the group's power and the one longing to be part of it. Except

for my personal blind spots, I have an awareness of the whole world I've created and follow the changes in each of my characters, their conflicts, hopes, fears and aspirations, the way I'd follow my own.

My task is to enable the diversity of voices within the whole play as well as those within each character to speak for themselves. I try to fully express a character's point of view before changing sides and speaking through the mask of another character. The completed play resolves the characters' conflicts as clearly as the curtain drops at the end. Once the play is produced I am no longer the sole creator of the work. The play takes on a life of its own through the actors' interpretation and the audience's experience. It enters the world as a re-enactment of my inner struggles and as a potential insight for the actors and audience into their own.

Writing, performing, or watching the play becomes a way of entering a difficult situation vicariously and changing one's perception and attitude toward it, without actually dealing with the specific people involved in the world outside the play. Although the play may resolve my characters' problems it doesn't resolve my personal conflict between fear of the group and longing to be part of it. Standing outside the play, stripped of the playwright's mask, my fears float like a dark cloud over my head, but a more powerful longing for love and community directs my passage from isolation to connection. From self-containment to collaboration

After Tom McGrath, a prominent playwright/ director/producer in Scotland, asked me to take part in an improvised rendition of one of my plays, I saw the collaborative process as a way to write the kind of scripts I envisioned. The following year, I started producing, directing and improvising in a collaborative drama based on my poetry. I was no longer writing fully developed scripts, but basic outlines in which collaborating artists inserted their own rendition of one of my characters. Like a one-woman band, I learned to play whatever part was needed at the time—playwright, publicist, fund-raiser, talent scout, director, storyteller, dancer, etc., and facilitated the dramatic conflict of the play from both within and outside the performance.

Producing a play in collaboration with the actors playing my characters as well as their own characters was far more challenging and reward-

ing than writing alone from my own inner conflict. Each of us actors became the writer, performer, and director of our own role. As the designer of the whole work, my job was to weave the different parts together into a dramatic whole.

Writing in collaboration has less to do with the craft of playwriting than with personal development and awareness as a member of a particular group. My priority shifted from writing well-wrought plays to improving my relationships with members of the group. The focus of creativity also shifted from the talents of one person to the rich diversity of the collective. Jazz Theatre

After several collaborative projects with other artists—dancers, visual artists, and musicians, I wrote The Cafe of No Tomorrows, as an experiment in what I termed "Jazz Theatre." Like a jazz score, the script left space for performing artists, as well as members of the audience, to improvise sounds, movement, or dialogue as integral parts of the whole drama.

When it was finally produced, the resolution of the dramatic conflict changed during each of the three performances. Besides using my words, the actors created their own dialogue, movement, and music in relation to each other's and the audience's improvisations.

In the last scene of the final performance, the leading man, who had chosen his leading lady because of conflicts in their professional work, improvised a marriage proposal to her. They then improvised their own wedding ceremony with three members of the audience at center stage. The actors became their own directors and resolved the dramatic conflict within the time and space set by the playwright.

As both playwright and director of the whole, I sat in the audience silently amazed at the magic and joy of the resolution, and by the simplicity of the love, wisdom and common ground found by the whole ensemble in the final hour of the play.

Jazz Theatre structures the basic polarity between the creative freedom of individuals and their need to be part of a collective. Like any ensemble work, it is most effective when all parts are aware of two contradictory views—their own and that of different voices in the group. Each player finds his/her own way to the target; the common vision agreed on by the group or the

ending chosen by the writer. The mystery and magic remain the same as in life—the process of discovering the way from beginning to end within the limits of time, space and mortality.

Jazz Theatre offers the group/community a model to explore the basic existential paradox of the human condition—to be free to choose one's own way within the limits of a pre-determined and prescriptive world. Integrating process and product: toward a Shamanic Theatre of Being

To help develop Jazz Theatre as a model for community drama, I founded The Elements, a group open to both "natural," community, and professional artists wanting to collaborate with me in developing the Shamanic Theatre of Being. I envisioned a space where anyone could enter as a creative human being with something, no matter how small, to contribute to shaping the whole project. As in a group conflict with facilitation, all actors, including the audience, would have a role to play and opportunities to change roles within the structure. Now a registered charity in Scotland, our stated purpose is:

to release individual and collective creative potential through participation in the arts; promote co-operation between artists, art forms and the public; and develop arts projects in support of our purpose. (The Elements Constitution)

Our work spans both community arts and professional productions. Since our first project in 1992, we have developed multi-media events with a wide range of people and groups and experimented with different ways to resolve the split between process and product and return western theatre to its original function as communal rite of passage from mundane work to creative play.

Whether wearing a mask to play a specific role or entering spontaneously as oneself, each participant expresses an aspect of themselves not usually accessible in their everyday reality. Improvising within a structure has been the hallmark of all our projects and the key to developing a Shamanic Theatre of Being, where any individual or group could insert their own content.

The dramatic structure or outline supports the process and creates a frame in which anything might happen. Each dramatic storytelling event both creates and tells the story as it is happening in the moment. As a result, the creative process becomes an integral part of the product.

Mythmaking and storytelling in facilitating group conflict

In our community arts projects, each theme, image or issue central to the group or an individual both inspires the development of the story and identifies the core conflict. Like children playing a game, professionally trained artists as well as naturally creative participants of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds, find their own way to the resolution—some from the sidelines, others by actively taking part. There are no scapegoats, villains or individual heroes, nor is anyone excluded, other than by their own choice, which becomes a role integrated into the drama as well. Each person chooses the extent to which they play their part. Whatever they choose becomes part of the story and storytelling.

For example, Return to Eden (1992), The Elements' first fully improvised and unscripted community storytelling drama, evolved from the Judeo-Christian Biblical story of creation in the Garden of Eden. I was interested in developing a new relationship between God, the serpent, and Man and Woman. I saw the myth as a way of returning to the core polarities between good and evil and man and woman at the root of Judeo-Christian beliefs. As the "Absent-minded Storyteller," who doesn't remember the original story, I wanted to facilitate these conflicts from inside the drama.

My paradoxical role opened the way for the whole group, including actors who chose their roles during preliminary workshops, and the audience who only knew the theme, to follow the quest in their own way. I told everyone at the beginning that we'd all play the dual role of creator/destroyer at different times in the story. During the storytelling, our roles also changed in varying degrees between participant/observer, outsider/insider, etc.

The first task was to build a wall around the vulnerable young tree we had planted prior to the event. The tree was at center stage, in an open field in an Edinburgh park. Audience participants built the wall with stakes, colored ribbons and flaming candles and surrounded it with apples floating on a red and white fabric moat. The Man and Woman stationed themselves inside the "wall'' to guard the tree and our tools of both construction and destruction—a sledge hammer, buzz saw, and scissors—from invasion by the outer world.

The Absent-minded Storyteller challenged both the outside group and the inside couple to convince each other to re-open the gates to Eden without using force and allow free two-way passage between the inner and outer worlds we had collectively built.

After several audience participants each failed to convince the inner guardians to open the way, another participant dragged a dead tree across the field to break through the "walls" at center stage. At the same time that the Absent-minded Storyteller, blind to this effort, asked the group, "Isn't this beautiful?"

Although the Man and Woman pushed the tree out, the conflict escalated when other participants came to help force the tree through the "walls." When the Man and Woman started to hit the tree with the sledge hammer, The Absent-minded Storyteller began to tremble in fear and told everyone how terrified she was. In retrospect I believe that The Storyteller was expressing her/ my fear as well as the silent fear of others. Although expressing the fear stopped the visible battle, it didn't release the anger. Before I could think of what to do next, a partly eaten apple came out of nowhere to bop me on the head. I had my answer. Stop thinking and get angry!

I ran screaming like a wounded animal around the walls until the Woman inside the walls caught my attention by throwing me kisses. I stopped to catch them as well as the other end of her scarf. We all seemed to become a bit more absent-minded and forgot the anger. The whole group spontaneously started dancing together, their rhythmic movements preparing the way for the surprising resolution. Both the Woman inside the walls and the Absent-minded Storyteller simultaneously pulled out their scissors to cut the colored ribbons surrounding the inner world. Others danced through or jumped over the ribbons. One participant who chose to be both The Blue Angel and Red Devil started tying the cut ribbons back together. With so many unknown and changing elements in the process, the synchronicity of our separate decisions was the joyful magic, the resolution that no amount of rehearsing could have achieved.

In The Ghost ofCraigentinny Castle (1994), everyone was searching for the secret life of the ghost, the mysterious "Green Lady" seen in different parts of Scotland for hundreds of years. The quest was an actual tour around the castle into

rooms that offered different experiences to answer the questions, "Who is the Green Lady and why is she here?"

A Tour de Forth (1994) was modeled on the game of life. The task was to visit each of three peripheral outside worlds, Reason, Passion and Authority, before entering the great mystery in the Center. Guarding the entrance to the Center Ark were various demons and obstacles created by the community participants, most of them children.

Each project started with a simple question, the first step in what I call an archetypal vision quest. Each outline I developed was a way to answer the question, as well as a game plan and model for adoption by any group anywhere in the world to process group conflict in community storytelling. Although we don't know to what extent participants are aware of the process or what they've learned about themselves, we do know that the experience changes their role from passive consumers to active participants. Actors and audience are free to choose ways of playing the story/game and completing the collective rite of passage within the limits of time and space. All participants are both acting and playing as themselves. Whatever they express at the time is valued and integrated into the collective storytelling process and becomes an inseparable part of the end product.

Experiencing changes may be a way of embodying them, i.e., remembering the event, like a dream, without necessarily understanding its meaning or its significance. Months after we presented Return to Eden, some participants said they were profoundly affected over time, while others said they enjoyed it, but regretted not "understanding" it.

New directions: arts in the 21st century Culture is the key component in defining human identity at individual, community and national levels. Through our culture we seek fulfillment and pleasure and the sense of being a whole person and a whole people. ("The Vision," The Charter for the Arts in Scotland, Edinburgh)

My work has now come full circle with the voice of the conventional playwright plaintively asking from within, "What about me?" Along with the Shamanic Theatre of Being that I've been developing with The Elements, I've also recently written fully scripted plays for and with traditional drama groups and for and with the conven-

tional side of me, now less frightened of the overwhelming majority of revolutionaries on my other side. Inspired by The Elements' improvised dramas, I've returned to solitary writing by inserting my own "culture" into the basic game plan I had already designed.

I see my work as part of a long group process toward individual and collective wholeness. The arts, especially community arts, are taking a lead in changing the role of the artist from eccentric outsider to social activist and cultural revolutionary, collaborating with others to become a whole person and part of a whole people. In addition to the vision statement of the Scottish Arts Council, various social agencies in the U.K. have been exploring different ways to incorporate creative and personal development in work with youth, psychiatric patients, people with learning and physical difficulties, etc.

Banlieues d'Europe: L'art dans la lutte contre ^exclusion (Peripheral communities of Europe: the arts in the struggle against social exclusion), a new international community arts organization, has also emerged in Europe to build a sense of community within and across cultures through participation in the arts. Their stated aim is to "democratize the arts by breaking through cultural barriers of social segregation" Qean Hurstel, "The Arts in the Struggle Against Social Exclusion," speech in Arts and Communities Conference, Drumchapel, Scotland, 12 November 1994). Conclusions

Applying process-oriented principles and tools in the theatre not only enables the arts to take a leading role in cultural transformations but also extends the "therapeutic" role of Process Work. The following are my conclusions and observations at this point in the development of a Shamanic Theatre of Being:

1. Therapeutic and creative processes are differentpaths which often lead to the same destination.They cross at points of personal and collectivechange. In the meeting, they nourish each otherwith their different ways of traveling.

Conflict facilitation is a creative process. One way of facilitating conflict in drama is the Jazz Theatre model, which makes the collaborative creative process an integral part of the end product.

Changing the role of the artist from isolated eccentric to social human being highlights the

collaborative dimension of the creative process. Changes in the audience's role from passive consumers of products to active contributors to a conflict's resolution values the process and the people for whoever they are and whatever they contribute. These changes also shift priorities in theatre from products to people and from performance to being.

In a Shamanic Theatre of Being, long term problems are processed as archetypal myths in dreamtime "reality." The storytelling drama resolves the conflicts introduced in a finite world within a short, manageable time frame. The structure of the storytelling event presents a clear starting point for each person to travel a different way, following their own rhythm as far as they can, to the common end and resolution. The only or last performance of a shamanic rite of passage amplifies our awareness of mortality and the last chance to change our experience.

Both Jazz Theatre and the Shamanic Theatre of Being offer ways to process global conflict locally. Further research and development

Although Fve learned a great deal about facilitating individual and group conflict through dramatic storytelling events, I feel that I'm only beginning to tap its potential to introduce new ways of seeing and being into the larger culture.

As The Elements' projects grow and we work with a wider diversity of communities and problems, it has become increasingly important to continue developing our relationship, conflict resolution, and community building skills, both before and after our public events. I have transformed the conventional rehearsal period for play production into workshops, developing these skills as an integral part of improvising during collaborative storytelling. We have just begun to offer weekly workshops throughout the year, with and without a culminating public presentation. This will enable The Elements to support and develop our work over time into a sustainable transferable "culture."

Although most of the workshop participants have been different from one project to another, a

small group of mainly "unemployed" people have been working together for nearly a year, developing the same theme, "awakening the heart," for presentation in three different local festivals. With a stable group of "actors," the potential for more confident, finely timed ensemble playing, magical changes, and synchronicities may increase.

I am also interested in developing cross-cultural events with participants whose language I don't know. As Fve experienced in a storytelling workshop I led in Oaxaca, Mexico, this will allow non-verbal ways of storytelling to emerge. With the largest international arts festival in the world running every year in Edinburgh, the possibility of developing multi-cultural events is greatly increased.

As this article goes to press, I will be directing a short course in "Storytelling in Words and Movement" with psychiatric patients and will have the opportunity to see how intentionally putting on a mask interacts with their experiences.

I'm particularly interested in learning how participants have integrated what they've created into their lives outside the theatre. To what extent do our storytelling workshops and events help people deal with the conflicts arising in their personal lives? With several members of The Elements inspired to study Process Work and Process Work students joining our projects, I feel we are building a small, flexible and durable foundation to support our way of bridging the gap between the creative and healing arts.

H. Lee Gershuny, Ph.D., is a founding member ofRSPOP-UK, founder and Artistic Director of The Elements and a director of the Edinburgh based Foundation for Community Leadership Development After 25 years teaching writing and literature in secondary schools, colleges and universities in the USA, she moved to Edinburgh, Scotland in 1988 to focus on creative writing. There she has been working with professional artists, youth, older people, people with HIV AIDS, psychiatric, physical and learning problems in expressing their experience through their creativity. As Leeala, her nom-de-plume, she is also an internationally published poet and award-winning playwright in both the USA and Scotland.