Dialogue between theater, psychodrama and psychotherapy

contributions of post-dramatic theater.

Abstract

During the 1960´s, along with the leading role that the body took center stage in areas such as dance or theater, therapeutic approaches emerged that put the body at the center of work. The emergence of numerous techniques and schools is a response to the need to work with patients for whom the sole use of the word and conventional framing was not enough. It has been discussed how repressed bodily meanings can be put into words through interpretation; also of body prints that were never symbolized and that will always be inaccessible to speech. Psychodrama always has the body present and has supported the inclusion of bodily techniques as a way of therapeutic change. Through the image of the therapy-theater relationship as communicating vessels, we will explore how the role of the body in renovating theatrical theory and pedagogy can enrich psychodrama. This arose in a period in which, although the avant-gardes had already burst into art, what today can be called post-dramatic theater had not yet been installed on the scene. Some terms commonly used in psychodrama (protagonist, stage, audience, catharsis, the very term psycho-drama) are linked to a dramatic vision of theater, which is still the predominant one in our time. However, inspiration could be found in a post-dramatic theater that seeks a pure experience, freed from the need to reach a meaning or an elaboration of that same experience, which remains mute to the word as implicit knowledge.