part 3 of a two hour gestalt session on awareness with actress bel baca. the focus here is "the rhythm of contact and withdrawal", alternating between contact with the environment and withdrawal into the void of "not knowing" to discover what fantasies and new ideas are waiting to emerge into awareness there. TO VIEW OR DOWNLOAD ALL OF MY VIDEOS, PLUS 1500 PAGES OF MY EXPLANATORY ESSAYS (ALL AT NO CHARGE) PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE: franklynwepner.com. ALSO PLEASE NOTE MY NEW EMAIL ADDRESS, IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH ME ANY COMMENTS ABOUT MY WORK: franklynwepner@gmail.com. IN THE LISTING OF VIDEOS THE LETTERS (HQ) REFER TO A HIGHER QUALITY VERSION OF THE VIDEO, WHICH IS AVAILABLE TO YOU IF YOUR COMPUTER CAN HANDLE IT. 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". Per

• published: 01 Jan 2011
• views: 27795

part 4 (last part) of a two hour gestalt session on awareness with actress bel baca. the focus here is "the rhythm of contact and withdrawal", alternating between contact with the environment and withdrawal into the void of "not knowing" to discover what fantasies and new ideas are waiting to emerge into awareness there. at the end of the session i encourage bel to recall the overall path she has traversed during the entire two hour session. i ask her to open herself to discovering any big picture, pattern, "gestalt" (means "pattern" in german) that emerged during the entire process. if we see the gestalt therapy pilgrim as a sort of god of a world he/she is creating moment by moment, then this last step is like the sabbath at the end of the seven days on which the "lord" rests and integrates the initial idea with all that unfolded during the other six days. this is aristotle's theory of action, that the "actual" is prior to the "potential", i.e., the overall encompassing action or gestalt is somehow logically more present than the individual moments of the action that unfold along the way. but this is only the case if the action stays in the here and now, the "messianic now", in which the knower, the known and the knowing all partake of a oneness. in this sense "god" is this encompassing oneness, the synthesis capable of integrating the myriad antitheses of his/her world. bel has shown herself willing and able to subordinate her ego to this here and now awareness process, and in this sense her humility is comparable to that of moses, which gave moses privileged access to god's torah, god's living word. bel thus joined the choosing/chosen people, those choosing to allow the divine soul to subjugate - for a while - the animal soul which usually drives us. from another perspective, if we regard each of the here and now moments along the way as our access to another face, countenance, point of view or "name" of god, then this final moment of an extended gestalt session is the moment of redemption at which god and names, his name, his nam(ing) are one. during this final moment of existential action the searcher allows the existential message of the awareness work or the dreamwork to emerge and swallow up all the fragmentary kaleidoscopic array of here and now moments that contributed their energy to this "strong gestalt". this also is leibniz' theory of an encompassing "monadology" with integrates all the "monads". if each here and now gestalt is a world, a monad, a living organism, then the encompassing gestalt, monadology or superorganism is a world of worlds, the body of god. man is such a superorganism, with a mind/soul capable of integrating the fuctioning of every organ, cell, cellule, molecule and atom. maimonides and then st. thomas borrowed this organic theory of action from aristotle and made it one basis of our contemporary judeo-christian worldview. maimonides, furthermore, used this theory as the starting point for his theory of prophecy. since this theory also is the basis of the stanislavski/brecht dialectical tradition of performer training, it is in this sense that a well trained performer is serving a prophetic function for an audience. such a performer needs to know enough about this way of working to be able consciously to harness it as the motor of his creative work. this puts the horse before the cart. of course, this is the exact opposite of how most performers work, with their insatiable ego hunger for fame and fortune. for more on this topic see the essays "prophecy here and now" and "rashi and b'reishit" at my website, "franklynwepner.com". TO VIEW OR DOWNLOAD ALL OF MY VIDEOS, PLUS 1500 PAGES OF MY EXPLANATORY ESSAYS (ALL AT NO CHARGE) PLEASE VISIT MY WEBSITE: franklynwepner.com. ALSO PLEASE NOTE MY NEW EMAIL ADDRESS, IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SHARE WITH ME ANY COMMENTS ABOUT MY WORK: franklynwepner@gmail.com. IN THE LISTING OF VIDEOS THE LETTERS (HQ) REFER TO A HIGHER QUALITY VERSION OF THE VIDEO, WHICH IS AVAILABLE TO YOU IF YOUR COMPUTER CAN HANDLE IT. 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 lo

• published: 02 Jan 2011
• views: 17529