Personality Dell'Arte

Personality Dell'Arte

August 11-15 2025 Boulder, Colorado, USA

PERSONALITY DELL’ ARTE

THE PLAY OF ROLES IN RELATIONSHIPS:
AN EXPLORATION OF THE SELF AS A COMMUNITY
through Psychodrama and Physical Theatre

with

Zsófi Kigyóssy & Giovanni Fusetti

(1)

A PLAYFUL JOURNEY OF PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

Welcome to a highly experiential and playful group of personal development in which the Psychodrama Approach and Physical Theatre will dance together to provide a unique experience of emotional awareness and embodied spontaneity.

The focus of the group will be on the exploration of the personality seen as a community of roles. In Psychodrama, we distinguish between inter-personal and intra-personal relationships, the second beeing the relationships with different parts of oneself.
These two words have in common the term persona, which in the Latin theatre was the term used for the theatre mask that defined a specific theatre character on stage. This term remains in the Italian and French word for character which is personaggio–personnage.
Carl Gustav Jung referred to the personality as a community of masks, and many different therapeutic approaches share the view of the psyche as a chorus of multiple forms: from Gestalt to Psychodrama, from Processwork to Family Constellations to the Theatre of the Oppressed, just to name a few. We can call these different forms roles, masks, characters, gestalts … and each of them can be brought into awareness and explored through theatre play.
Psychodrama sees all roles as relational, in the sense that they all emerged in the relationship between the individual and their social field.

In the Psychodrama approach each individual is seen as a fascinating community of roles, each of them manifesting different desires and needs, potentials and dilemmas, complicity and conflicts. 
Physical theater sees theme as characters of a play, types of a personal inner scenario in which highly theatrical events keep happening: conflicts, alliances, crescendo, development of themes, amplifications, resolutions, dramatic peaks and happy or tragic endings.

In the everyday unfolding of our life, through the various relationships in which we are involved, many roles appear. Some of them are recurrent and very familiar, others might be more unknown or problematic, at the point of remaining in the background, hiding from awareness. Some have developed in response to traumatic events or unmet needs, others are holding the precious connection with deep desires and potentials of the person.
In Psychodrama the person is encouraged to bring these roles into the light of awareness and explore them through play.
The amplification and the play of the different roles often bring humor into the personal process. Playing a problematic role of our personality deepens the somatic experience, sometimes bringing the role to its grotesque nature, when we can fully realize the depth and intensity of their drives and urges, as well as their intrinsic paradoxes. The protagonist of the Psychodrama can stage their personality with the support of the group and witness the inner drama of their psyche, which can be seen and transposed through the lenses of the theatre genres. Tragedy, Melodrama, Satyre, Absurd and, very often, Comedy!

Welcome to the theatre of the psyche!

(2)

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN…

The workshop is open to anyone wishing to engage in a quest of personal awareness and emotional awakening through role playing and theatrical games, within the context of a Psychodrama group.
This workshop is specifically designed for anyone interested in exploring their psychological field in an embodied and theatrical way, in which the body and its language comes first, before words. 

  • Theatre practitioners who are interested in a therapeutic process that includes play and theatricality: this can be as deeply healing as fundamentally fun.
  • Teachers, educators, therapists, psychotherapists, psychodramatists, drama-therapists and anyone active in the field of healing who is interested in exploring psychology using a theatrical paradigm based on embodiment, play and fun.
  • Anyone who is already engaged in a theatrical or therapeutic process.
  • Adventurers of the Psyche who know and feel that humor and play are great allies in the journey of becoming.

If you are coming from the field of theatre arts, you can expect to practice a therapeutic process constantly fed by the dynamics and techniques of physical theatre and embodied play.
If you are coming from the psychological field you can expect to explore emotional processes and wounds through theatrical games, exercises and the creation of characters, both in collective movement practice and through improvisation.

A fierce and playful curiosity about human folly and beauty is required, as well as a passionate engagement to the exploration of one’s own emotional life in an artistic way.
Though no previous specific knowledge of Psychodrama and Physical Theatre are required, a previous experience in Personal Development/Therapy and in Theatre is necessary.