The Rainbow of Desire

With Guy Gladstone at The Open Centre 188 Old Street London EC1V 9FR Tel: 020 7272 6672 or email

Modern life can be viewed as a field in which multiple centres of influence operate on the individual through a constant process of distraction, dictation or suggestion.

Parents, peergroups, politicians, professionals, teachers, business and the media are all engaged in (often contrary) battles for your mind, struggling to obtain compliance of one kind or another, obstructing your will and fostering passivity. Most repression of desires, both personal and political, takes subtle forms rather than gross abuses of human rights (compare Western Europe since 1945 with Eastern Europe in 1999 and before).

For more on this topic see the postscript to this text 'Consciousness Colonized'.

Note 1 Many enablers or helpers of others tend to fight their own oppression through someone else's struggle.

Note 2 Much psychotherapy and complementary therapy is devoid of playfulness and socially decontextualized. Thus therapy itself escapes critique and becomes part of the uncontested field.

The Conflict (Battleground)

This workshop raises (but doesn't promise to answer) the relationship between personal growth and social change. Is therapy a technique for coping with this society or a resource for changing it ?

Most would agree we are needlessly and unconsciously restricted by habitual social roles. The Rainbow of Desire takes you a step further. You can reverse your position as a passive consumer or spectator of the spectacle (the organization of appearances in everyday life) and become a spect-actor, an engaged participant rehearsing strategies that are for both personal and social change and also reveal the power structures within which you are suspended.

Through osmosis the values of your society exist in you whether you like it / realise it or not. Your body is shaped by the demands made on it by particular kinds of work. Social deformation is so normal you may hardly question it. Alienation is muscular. Who has power over you? Feel your trapezius! Who and what stands between you and taking control of your life? Feel your headache and the nerve pathways that enforce it, feel your tiredness, and the throttle on your throat.

Because the mechanisms of oppression shape the body, it is through the body and its habits that these same mechanisms can be exposed. Bodies are inevitably ideologically encoded. This workshop explores power within (in more than one sense) and power with others.

Note 3 'Every oppressed person is a subjugated subversive' (Augusto Boal)

Submission and subjugation depend on the presence of 'the cop in the head'. Dismissing the cop in the head dynamises the subversive.

Note 4 Much New Age transformational ideology thrives on bodymind splitting and fantasies of mental omnipotence eg: I choose my thoughts and nothing touches me. I live in a recess of my head.

The Process (Playground)

This playshop workshop uses the image theatre of Augusto Boal, Brazilian theatre director and social activist. Warming up through sound and movement, interaction and bodysculpting you will be exploring the body as a nonverbal expressive tool for presenting feelings, ideas and attitudes. You will go on to create images of your own experience of oppression.

Naming an oppression leads to naming the power relationship producing it, and finally naming what you would like to replace it with. In The Rainbow of Desire persistent but disembodied voices of oppression are physicalised and animated so that you gain a handle on them through addressing them as real antagonistic forces. The method is ideal for challenging prevailing hierarchical values and structures, a form of consciousness raising through non-verbal and not easily verbalised responses to oppression. Given time, care and trust the images created speak for themselves, in the power of the moment.

Though the binds, blocks and barriers you present are your own, are personal, the issues raised are collective. The Rainbow of Desire starts with an account of one person's oppression, in the first person singular. The image is then multiplied, pluralised, to arrive at a picture of the general mechanism of oppression. All present can then examine different possibilities for breaking out of it. No interpretation or explanation is offered, simply multiple points of reference. Images in this context do not translate into words. You work simultaneously with the image of reality you have created, and playing with the reality of the image, you extrapolate back to social reality. This is an aesthetic practice to modify the social world, the stage of the workshop becomes a rehearsal space for real life.

The Benefits (Foreground)

• You clarify your desires and make them dynamic
  
  
• You confront the obstacles to their realization and you witness a variety of potential solutions.
  
  
• You purge fears instilled by the cop in your head without purging the desire to act for change. You dynamize your desire and its oppression, thereby making solace in passivity a sorry and undesirable state.
  
  
• If as an oppressed person you yourself perform an action within a theatrical fiction - rather than have an artist, expert or professional person perform that same action for you, you are enabled and activated towards performing it yourself in your current life.
  
  
• Becoming more conscious of the specific forms of oppression you have individually experienced helps to short-circuit a tendency to inflict on others the damage you have suffered. Oppression is represented in order that it is not reproduced.
  
  
• You become conscious of the web in which all are implicated, propagating as well as opposing various forms of oppression and powerlessness.
  
  
• You identify with both oppressor and oppressed and thereby learn to deal with internal tensions that mirror the external conflicts of interest.
  
  
• You replace naive polarizations of oppressor and oppressed with an understanding of the continuum of oppressive tendencies.
  
  
• You develop a capacity to balance empathy for the oppressed within the oppressor with a capacity to name and act against oppression.
  
  
• You confront your inability or unwillingness to recognise your power or where you stand in various hierarchies.
  
  
• You have an opportunity to identify your behavioural masks and practise taking them on and off. By moving from mask to mask you can create a useful critical distance.
  
  
• You democratise both therapy and performance skills, assuming that everyone already does give help and act.
  
  
• You develop a capacity to quickly and spontaneously transform one non-verbal image into another.
  
  
• You engage with issues of trust, safety, physical boundaries and body image.
  
  
• You explore polarities such as cooperation versus competition, spontaneity versus inhibition and reflection versus action.
  
  
• You establish dialogues where previously there were monologues, two way communication where before there was one way dictation.
  
  
• You create a future for yourself now rather than wait for it to impose itself on you.

Booking Procedure

You may ring at any time to ascertain current availability of places on Sensations series workshops. You may book directly using the registration form. If you want to discuss booking or have any queries you may ring beforehand on 020 7272 6672 or email.

Sensations Series

The Rainbow of Desire can be attended on its own or in a series of six theme based workshops. Details of any of the other Sensations series workshops are available on this website. The others are Sexualities and Suppressions; Facing up to Shame; Body Image, Discovery and Change; Shock and Stress; and Anger, All Angles. The unifying element of these workshops will be an exploration of the phenomena of your personal bodily experience. Participants will be helped to recall and communicate the exact sensations associated with their experience. The charge of the themes will be grounded and contained through carefully structured exercises.

Attending a Sensations series workshop may serve as an introduction to work in one of several ongoing analytical body psychotherapy groups. Further details of weekly ongoing groups and weekend groups are available on this website. Current or former members of these groups may also attend the theme workshops in order to focus on specific concerns surfaced/surfacing in that setting.

To discuss booking or if you have any queries please ring Guy Gladstone on 020 7272 6672 or email.

Postscript
Consciousness Colonised

How do you get a handle on your own inner voices that side with the new soft police of the global free market, the 'experts', spin doctors, strategists and other figures in the shadows behind the media frontage to whom you are almost certainly giving the power of knowing better than you do what is good for you? The point here is that these assorted hired hacks count on having agents and subscribers in your head and hearts and guts. The colonization of consciousness proceeds by promoting illusory choices while removing real choices.

The connections between outer and inner oppression have become more obscure as boundaries are more permeable, images more subtly insistent and invasive, information overload more normal and identifying sources more problematic. How then do you distinguish appropriate worry from unnecessary paranoia?

How do you know when someone who purports to know and care neither really knows nor cares and indeed has an ulterior motive (usually securing influence, profit or obedience)? How do you know when to shut your eyes or block your ears or turn your back or keep quiet and when you had better take a good look, listen carefully, take steps to intervene or speak out?

By addressing the individual psychic basis of fragmentation of community, upon which the global free market thrives, personal and political tides will turn. This workshop is ecotherapy.

It presents tools for evicting the agents, canceling the subscriptions, countermanding the standing orders, switching off corrupt transmissions, cleaning up psycho - pollution. Recovery of clarity, integrity and capacity for social initiative depends upon the immunity that goes with and power that comes of an aboriginal heart within a playful body in dialogue with an informed mind.

Guy Gladstone

Is a body psychotherapist who has been working for twenty years with ongoing and weekend groups at The Open Centre, the long established (1977) independent personal growth centre. He is accredited as a group psychotherapist and bodywork practitioner by the Association of Humanistic Psychology Practitioners and is a graduate of three trainings - The Institute for the Development of Human Potential (2 years), The Institute of Psychotherapy and Social Studies (3 years) and The British Association of Analytical Body Psychotherapy (5 years). He supervises practitioners in a variety of settings.

He is a member of Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility and has trained with Augusto Boal in The Rainbow of Desire as part of a longstanding interest in the intersection of therapy, theatre and politics.

TO FIND DATES OF UPCOMING EVENTS PLEASE GO TO THE REGISTRATION FORM

If you yourself are not interested in this Bodyspace event kindly pass this information on