It is a reality: the pandemic has affected the internal relationships between the members of the families that they have had to face, for example, confinement, boredom, boredom, work and virtual classes, unemployment and other situations that can cause emotional exhaustion. As an aid to remedy it, the collective Body Chronicles, led by the Guayaquil actress Rossana Iturralde, is running the project Theater for young people and adults, a playful and psychotherapeutic option in times of COVID.
“The idea is that the workshops can help people to know breathing techniques, relaxation, to enter into a different dynamic that only the practice of theater (performing arts) can achieve, through playful exercises that allow the participants to distance themselves from the problems generated by the confinement and in this way be able to face them more adequately”, Iturralde indicates about this initiative sponsored by the Directorate of Culture of the Mayor’s Office of Guayaquil.
The project started on January 12, 13 and 14 with the virtual exhibition of the work The age of the plum by the playwright Arístides Vargas, with the performance and direction of Iturralde and the Quito actress Nadyezhda Loza, which reached a total of 940 people, including students, teachers and directors of three selected educational units.
This work was chosen because it presents situations very close to those of any Latin American or Ecuadorian family, with conflicts inherent in their interpersonal relationships. This way, the spectators could reflect during the forum on the similarities with their own lives, explains Iturralde, who with that work won the 2018 ATI award in New York for best actress on tour.
After the function, a forum for socializing with viewers, who in the end were invited to participate in the second stage of the project.
That second phase was another workshop dictated between Tuesday 18 and Monday 24 January to 43 people, between young people and adults, to exercise awareness-raising, integration, development of creativity, imagination and technical knowledge to create theatrical situations and characters.
“When you start working with a group of people who have not had any relationship with the theater, the exercises and games that are used have as their main objective that the participants become aware of their bodies, of their possibilities of expression, which implies a constant learning and recognition of themselves and their fellow workshop participants”, explains Rossana.
“From there you can enter a different dimension, which is the path to the development of imagination and creativity, with very playful exercises that, in addition to having fun, help them find a dreamlike dimension in which they discover other rhythms, nuances, sounds that emerge from their inner worlds and that have accumulated without being fully conscious throughout their lives and sensory experiences”.
Finally, 26 workshop participants were chosen to be part of a six-week module duration, which began on Tuesday January 25, to focus on theatrical techniques with the aim of creating scenes inspired by the personal experiences that emerged during the process.
“We are in the stage of creating movements that build bodily sequences in each participant, starting from impulses that give rise to creation, in such a way that each workshop participant finds their personal poetry, their way of narrating stories that appear spontaneously, without impositions from the management, which becomes in a guide for each performer to find their own, the intimate, the personal”, says the director.
As the final part of this process, each workshop participant will present stories of body poetics through their movements, with displacements and interrelationships with their companions. “These are stories that are born of motivated impulses through exercises that help release energy. Among the little ones, fantastic stories will be told that will be intertwined with the stories of their other classmates.”
The project will end with virtual representations through the social networks and channels that establish the educational centers to which each workshop facilitator belongs. And each story will seek to be a motivation to, through theater, reduce stress in these times of pandemic. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
