The workshop Sub-Plays has been organized twice in Skopje and a third event is being planned.
This workshop is an all-day séance for grown-ups in which participants, through psychological, theatrical, and dance exercises, discover and perceive a part of their sub-personae and are encouraged to play their parts in a way they best feel them.
What parts do we play in our lives, driven by the voices of our sub-personae?
But – what are sub-personae?
Simply put, sub-personae – every person has them and they differ individually – are the different voices in our psyche and oftentimes they fight for dominance. Every sub-persona does something for a certain wish of the whole person. For a person to reach better integration, it needs to investigate, unfold, and get to know better their voices and to give individual meaning to each and every one of them.
I had the opportunity to attend this extraordinary workshop – Sub-Plays – the first in a series of workshops for self-exploration and self-revelation through artistic forms as part of a series of weekend projects organized by Ars Locus, focused on the non-institutional implementation of artistic and open-minded education in the educational process, i.e. self-revelation through PLAYING!
Through the psychological exercises under Irina Nikolovska’a mentorship – psychologist and gestalt therapy educator – participants had the chance to be conscious while they identified and awoke their sub-personae – quite a positive surprise. Through theatre, by using a specific form of expression and by free improvisation – commedia dell’arte – Ivana Atanasova (actress) gave the already revealed sub-personae a role and challenged them to play themselves.
The dance strove to awaken the awareness, break the space boundaries and once again merge them into one – body and mind; of course, with help from the exceptional Vilma Samradzija, ballet dancer.
The methods that were used in the workshop allowed everyone individually to force and model their own feelings, revive their fantasy, yield themselves to surprising situations, and defy the expected endings.
The purpose of these expressive workshops is to reach ideas such as freedom, self-expression, self-exploration etc. by using the diversity of different art forms as a medium.
Translated by: Robert Raman
This post is also available in: Macedonian
