Psychodrama techniques with new names

 

Mecca Burns has just come out with a new three-minute video illustrating techniques that psychodramatists will find very familiar.

Role reversal is "Switching Roles."
Doubling is "Thought Bubble."
Mirroring is "Screen Image."
Surplus reality is "Three Wishes."

The video, titled Presence,  is elegantly done and the new names, admittedly, bring a freshness to these techniques originated by Dr. J.L. Moreno, the developer of psychodrama, and Augusto Boal, the developer of Theatre of the Oppressed.

Mecca is a drama therapist and co-founder of Presence Center for Applied Theatre Arts which utilizes Theatre of the Oppressed, drama therapy and Playback Theatre to address matters of race, gender, culture and ability.

She is based in Charlottesville, Va., and trains drama therapists and organizes participatory theater in Uganda, Kenya and Spain as well as the United States. For many years she worked as a drama therapist with youth and adults in residential settings. For the past 10 years, she has specialized in working with children with special needs and communities with social justice issues.

"Midnight in Paris" a great example of surplus reality

Midnight in Paris has been garnering lots of movie award sparkle, especially the recent win for writer-director Woody Allen as best original screenplay  from the Writer's Guild of America. He also received the Oscar statuette for the screenplay at last month's Academy Awards.

The film stars Owen Wilson as a modern Hollywood writer who stumbles into another dimension of time and has a chance to hang with his literary idols in the 1920s Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Stein.

This movie is a perfect example for working with surplus reality.  In psychodrama, surplus reality refers to putting into action a wish or a dream. The protagonist has the opportunity to experience this alternate reality to satisfy his or her "act hunger" and learn about self, choices and experience life from this other reality.

Here's a video that gives a taste of the movie: