drama as communication

[Adam Blatner]

Here's a small essay for my blog. I'd be interested in what you might want to add to this list. 


Drama as Communication:

Drama should be recognized as being more than just putting on plays for entertainment. It also offers value as a deeper/multi-dimensional form of communication. It offers more elements for exploring issues than does mere discussion or talking about things. Adding play, psychodramatic techniques, surplus reality, etc., we can talk with each other and then do a variety of additional maneuvers:

-- comment on nonverbal communications, our own and the other person's
-- replay an interaction having shifted our nonverbal communication, voice tone, other variables
-- try out hypotheses, playing out mini-scenes, exploring playfully where they lead us
-- replay and repeat so that we become more effective, satisfactory
-- play out "worst possible" scenes to express our immature, negative, angry parts, but putting them into a relatively harmless context in which they are recognized as what the "inner brat" wants to say... recognizing that we get overloaded, feel helpless, and in other ways wish we could regress.. 

-- play out better than best possible scenes, talking to presidential candidates, God, goddess, angels, ancestors, asking for help, getting guidance

-- identify certain roles as social-role based, both expressing and diagnosing hidden assumptions, biases, prejudices, rules, norms, expectations, and so forth that are more part of the common culture---the regional, national, even species-archetypal foundations--more than the results of our individual personal (e.g. childhood, family background) roots. This is sociodrama and axiodrama. Doing so makes it easier to distance ourselves from these types of "programming."
-- role reverse, for compassionate understanding, even with those we are inclined to think of as "enemies" 

-- do role analysis to break down over-generalizations 

-- think sociometrically, about depth psychology and preferences, tele and rapport, even towards those we would prefer not to have those feelings..

-- value the creativity potential in encounters, the opportunity to generate new syntheses, integrations

... stuff like that, it seems to me, tends not to happen in ordinary discussions, much less debates.

I'll be interested in what you might want to add to this list. Thus, psychodramatically-informed encounters (too big a term.. seeking something simpler) offer a more multi-dimensional and holistic type of communication? 

Adam Blatner, M.D.
   website: www.blatner.com/adam/   
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