Setting the stage

Shadows beckon us away from the familiar, and towards our creative imagination. Ancient and powerful, Shadow Theatre integrates visual art, physical theatre, music and storytelling. As an intermodal play space, Shadow Theatre offers distancing strategies conducive to playing with taboo or traumatic material in metaphoric, veiled or abstracted ways. This experiential workshop invites practitioners (teachers, social workers, therapists, community workers) to devise participatory shadow theatre, engage with deep dialogue and celebrate resilience.

This workshop will start with a brief presentation about Shadow Liberation (participatory shadow theatre for healing and social change), and a couple case examples to contextualize the method. The brief introduction will be followed by Shadow Play and move deeper. Through collaborative and trust building activities we can cultivate a supportive and open environment to share and honor personal stories with the knowledge that potentially shameful secrets are common experiences, we weave the collective truths into powerful acts of resilience. With an emphasis on trauma, this workshop will blend Drama Therapy and Theatre of the Oppressed with Shadow techniques including: Overhead Projector Paper Puppetry, Body as Puppet, Moving Light Sources and Basic Optical Illusions in Shadow Theatre. All techniques presented honor multiple ways of knowing and learning while putting forth an integrated arts based approach to creative group work.

In this workshop participants will learn projective techniques for therapeutic play in the shadows. Participants will become familiar with the process of balancing aesthetic distance in improvised shadow play. Experiential activities will be intertwined with theoretical framing & discussion of the method to support participants in integrating what they learn into their practice. No prior experience with theatre is required.