HQ. gestalt work on awareness, part 1. hebrew subtitles added. BY FRANKLYN WEPNER SEPTEMBER 1, 2006 HOW I WORK: GESTALT DREAMWORK AS THEATER AND PROPHECY GESTALT DREAM WORK AS PREPARATION FOR PERFORMING Since 1975 I have been using Gestalt work on awareness, dreams and personal relationships as a way to train and direct performers. The basic principle is simple. I use the Gestalt work to peel the onion of layer after layer of social cliches, ego games and unfinished personal business, and then I do the reverse process reconstituting the onion in the form of characters or other artist structures. The existential message of the dream becomes the superobjective or action of the tragedy, and then I build up the way the performer handles the characters and the plot around that. My usual procedure is to begin the training with three Gestalt sessions, one on one. The first session, two hours long, deals with the three zones of awareness. During the first hour I simply let him relate what he aware of, since I want to know how he operates before I start meddling with his life. This is important since overall during the Gestalt sessions we are peeling the onion of cliches and games to get to authentic action, and later we will need all of those layers to rebuild the onion as characters involved in the unfolding action of a drama. We need his cliche and game layers for the beginning of the action in Act One as much as we need his authentic action at the end of the dramatic action for Acts Four and Five of a tragic drama. During the second hour of the first Gestalt session on awareness I attempt to guide him towards a balance of the zones of awareness: outer zone awareness of the environment, inner zone awareness of his body, and fantasy zone awareness of his daydreams. The second and third Gestalt sessions are each three hours long, and each is a typical Gestalt dreamwork session as presented by Fritz Perls in Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. The performer tells the dream in the here and now, identifies with (play acts) several of the main images of the dream in dialogues with each other, and experiences the rhythm of contact and withdrawal. That is to say, after each major dialogue of polarized sides of himself (the contact part) he is instructed to close his eyes, enter his body awareness and daydream (the withdrawal phase of the rhythm). Since my goal is theater as well as healing, whenever possible during the Gestalt dreamwork I encourage lots of expression using sound and movements. I work with a palette of about 200 different types of recorded musical excerpts, and whenever appropriate I ask him if that image or emotional state were part of a movie what sort of music might be the sound track. Then I find something close to that in my palette of musical colors and ask him to express the mood using the music along with his vocalizing and expressive movements. While he is doing the entire session I spend most of my time jotting down near verbatim notes and making stick figures of his poses and movements, since later in the work I will feed all this back to him and encourage him to explore using it as creative material for acting, dance or whatever his medium is. Taping the session is less useful, since then I would need to spend too much time replaying the tapes. Taking notes live forces me to sort out the wheat from the chaff very efficiently, even at the cost of not observing or notating every detail. WORKING OUT FROM YOUR CENTERS After the three introductory one on one Gestalt sessions, session number four is for feedback and discussion of the results. I show him in my notes and diagrams all of the stages of competed and uncompleted actions, and together we search for characters in the theater literature that have similar patterns of action. Is he a Hamlet type, or an Oedipus type, for example? In contrast to the usual practice in acting classes, his first acting assignment probably will be a monologue from a serious tragedy, since I want him to begin with a dramatic action with which he can identify totally. In this process he is using his major Gestalt moments as what Michael Chekhov in his book "To The Actor" labels "psychological gestures". Perls calls them the "essences" of a patient's personality, or we can say he is working from his "centers", stretching those sounds, moves and psychological motivations in as many creative directions as he can. I monitor closely to be sure he is not faking it, the way most actors end up doing since they do not have the centers to begin with. Before the performer begins working with others doing improvs and scenework, there is an important transitional stage in the work in which I help him get comfortable using his very personal Gestalt material freely as creative material. He needs to shift from seeing himself as a patient to enjoying the role of an artist of the

• published: 13 Aug 2011
• views: 18234

"Miss Daisy Cutter" is an animated short film by Laen Sanches featuring "Nux Vomica" by The Veils. If Walt Disney took some bad acid this is what his trip would look like. Don’t say you weren’t warned. ★ About: My goal with this project was to tell a non narrative story in an unusual visual way, preferably in the form of a collage made of rough animated sketches and scribblings. I wanted to reinterpret some of the archetypes of the Psychedelic-Pop-Rock-Punk visuals of the 60's and 70's and the result to be clashing graphical art styles with a strong feeling of crafted artworks in between painting, etching, comic book, manga and dealing eventually with abstract shapes. So, to make things more interesting, I decided to experiment with a different way of working. No storyboards and scripts: Only improvisation on the fly. Deliberately working with a surrealist approach, designing and animating with an 'automatic drawing' technique. Producing a few seconds of animation each day without thinking of what was made the day before. And because it still wasn't complicated enough, I also wanted to bring depth into it somehow, and worked with the third dimension in order to funkify the viewer's perception and surprise his brain. I'm now color blind... cyan from the left eye and red from the right one. ★ Credits: Produced, directed & animated by Laen Sanches Music: “Nux Vomica” by The Veils (P) 2006 Rough Trade Records Limited Licensed courtesy of Rough Trade Records Limited www.roughtraderecords.com © 2010 Laen Sanches ★ TV Broadcast (2012-2013): Arte (FRA / GER) ★ Awards Quality Prize 2013 - CNC Winner 2012 "Arte Prize - First 3D Stereoscopic Short" Premiers Plans Angers Winner 2012 "Music Video" category - Black & White Festival (Porto) Winner 2011 "Music Video" category - BAF Bradford Animation Festival Winner 2011 "Animation" category - Dimension 3 Film Festival (Paris) Winner 2011 "3D Stereoscopic" category - Be Film Festival (New York) Honorable Mention - LA 3D 8th Annual Movie Festival (Los Angeles) ★ Official Selections 60+ Festivals in 25+ countries (incl. Clermont-Ferrand, Annecy, Woodstock, Pictoplasma, Trickfilm, Arcipelago, M2M, Zagreb, Short Film Corner Cannes…) ★ Publication Stash Magazine #74 November 2010 ★ Contact: For commercial work enquiries in The Netherlands please contact: www.Artcore.nl For all others enquiries: www.laensanches.com ★ Watch it in 2D here: vimeo.com/13492236 ★ Tips for the best 3D stereoscopic viewing conditions: - Use red & cyan anaglyph glasses - Switch to the Flash player instead of the HTML5 player - Distance to screen = approx. x 5 times the diagonal of the film - Dark environment or black background - Play it loud!

• published: 09 Aug 2010
• views: 11811

HQ. gestalt work on awareness, part 1. hebrew subtitles added. BY FRANKLYN WEPNER SEPTEMBER 1, 2006 HOW I WORK: GESTALT DREAMWORK AS THEATER AND PROPHECY GESTALT DREAM WORK AS PREPARATION FOR PERFORMING Since 1975 I have been using Gestalt work on awareness, dreams and personal relationships as a way to train and direct performers. The basic principle is simple. I use the Gestalt work to peel the onion of layer after layer of social cliches, ego games and unfinished personal business, and then I do the reverse process reconstituting the onion in the form of characters or other artist structures. The existential message of the dream becomes the superobjective or action of the tragedy, and then I build up the way the performer handles the characters and the plot around that. My usual procedure is to begin the training with three Gestalt sessions, one on one. The first session, two hours long, deals with the three zones of awareness. During the first hour I simply let him relate what he aware of, since I want to know how he operates before I start meddling with his life. This is important since overall during the Gestalt sessions we are peeling the onion of cliches and games to get to authentic action, and later we will need all of those layers to rebuild the onion as characters involved in the unfolding action of a drama. We need his cliche and game layers for the beginning of the action in Act One as much as we need his authentic action at the end of the dramatic action for Acts Four and Five of a tragic drama. During the second hour of the first Gestalt session on awareness I attempt to guide him towards a balance of the zones of awareness: outer zone awareness of the environment, inner zone awareness of his body, and fantasy zone awareness of his daydreams. The second and third Gestalt sessions are each three hours long, and each is a typical Gestalt dreamwork session as presented by Fritz Perls in Gestalt Therapy Verbatim. The performer tells the dream in the here and now, identifies with (play acts) several of the main images of the dream in dialogues with each other, and experiences the rhythm of contact and withdrawal. That is to say, after each major dialogue of polarized sides of himself (the contact part) he is instructed to close his eyes, enter his body awareness and daydream (the withdrawal phase of the rhythm). Since my goal is theater as well as healing, whenever possible during the Gestalt dreamwork I encourage lots of expression using sound and movements. I work with a palette of about 200 different types of recorded musical excerpts, and whenever appropriate I ask him if that image or emotional state were part of a movie what sort of music might be the sound track. Then I find something close to that in my palette of musical colors and ask him to express the mood using the music along with his vocalizing and expressive movements. While he is doing the entire session I spend most of my time jotting down near verbatim notes and making stick figures of his poses and movements, since later in the work I will feed all this back to him and encourage him to explore using it as creative material for acting, dance or whatever his medium is. Taping the session is less useful, since then I would need to spend too much time replaying the tapes. Taking notes live forces me to sort out the wheat from the chaff very efficiently, even at the cost of not observing or notating every detail. WORKING OUT FROM YOUR CENTERS After the three introductory one on one Gestalt sessions, session number four is for feedback and discussion of the results. I show him in my notes and diagrams all of the stages of competed and uncompleted actions, and together we search for characters in the theater literature that have similar patterns of action. Is he a Hamlet type, or an Oedipus type, for example? In contrast to the usual practice in acting classes, his first acting assignment probably will be a monologue from a serious tragedy, since I want him to begin with a dramatic action with which he can identify totally. In this process he is using his major Gestalt moments as what Michael Chekhov in his book "To The Actor" labels "psychological gestures". Perls calls them the "essences" of a patient's personality, or we can say he is working from his "centers", stretching those sounds, moves and psychological motivations in as many creative directions as he can. I monitor closely to be sure he is not faking it, the way most actors end up doing since they do not have the centers to begin with. Before the performer begins working with others doing improvs and scenework, there is an important transitional stage in the work in which I help him get comfortable using his very personal Gestalt material freely as creative material. He needs to shift from seeing himself as a patient to enjoying the role of an artist of the

• published: 13 Aug 2011
• views: 18234

"Miss Daisy Cutter" is an animated short film by Laen Sanches featuring "Nux Vomica" by The Veils. If Walt Disney took some bad acid this is what his trip would look like. Don’t say you weren’t warned. ★ About: My goal with this project was to tell a non narrative story in an unusual visual way, preferably in the form of a collage made of rough animated sketches and scribblings. I wanted to reinterpret some of the archetypes of the Psychedelic-Pop-Rock-Punk visuals of the 60's and 70's and the result to be clashing graphical art styles with a strong feeling of crafted artworks in between painting, etching, comic book, manga and dealing eventually with abstract shapes. So, to make things more interesting, I decided to experiment with a different way of working. No storyboards and scripts: Only improvisation on the fly. Deliberately working with a surrealist approach, designing and animating with an 'automatic drawing' technique. Producing a few seconds of animation each day without thinking of what was made the day before. And because it still wasn't complicated enough, I also wanted to bring depth into it somehow, and worked with the third dimension in order to funkify the viewer's perception and surprise his brain. I'm now color blind... cyan from the left eye and red from the right one. ★ Credits: Produced, directed & animated by Laen Sanches Music: “Nux Vomica” by The Veils (P) 2006 Rough Trade Records Limited Licensed courtesy of Rough Trade Records Limited www.roughtraderecords.com © 2010 Laen Sanches ★ TV Broadcast (2012-2013): Arte (FRA / GER) ★ Awards Quality Prize 2013 - CNC Winner 2012 "Arte Prize - First 3D Stereoscopic Short" Premiers Plans Angers Winner 2012 "Music Video" category - Black & White Festival (Porto) Winner 2011 "Music Video" category - BAF Bradford Animation Festival Winner 2011 "Animation" category - Dimension 3 Film Festival (Paris) Winner 2011 "3D Stereoscopic" category - Be Film Festival (New York) Honorable Mention - LA 3D 8th Annual Movie Festival (Los Angeles) ★ Official Selections 60+ Festivals in 25+ countries (incl. Clermont-Ferrand, Annecy, Woodstock, Pictoplasma, Trickfilm, Arcipelago, M2M, Zagreb, Short Film Corner Cannes…) ★ Publication Stash Magazine #74 November 2010 ★ Contact: For commercial work enquiries in The Netherlands please contact: www.Artcore.nl For all others enquiries: www.laensanches.com ★ Watch it in 2D here: vimeo.com/13492236 ★ Tips for the best 3D stereoscopic viewing conditions: - Use red & cyan anaglyph glasses - Switch to the Flash player instead of the HTML5 player - Distance to screen = approx. x 5 times the diagonal of the film - Dark environment or black background - Play it loud!

• published: 09 Aug 2010
• views: 11811