UPDATE/MAGIC THEATER WORKSHOP
OCTOBER 17, 2011. First—urging those who have indicated they are coming to San Diego for the December 10-11 workshop to contact me soon about details, payment, etc. You want to make sure you have a hotel room available. Also, I’m keeping the group fairly small.
In addition to the Magic Theater dialogues, I’ll be conducting a few sound/energy exercises that are quite powerful. They engage participants in the whole order/chaos barometer, as I call it, which is the tendency to choose a rigid balance of order-versus-chaos in life and stick to it, to the bitter end. Instead, there are wide-ranging possibilities for opening up this vast arena, liberating new energies of body and mind…
All in all, I view this kickoff workshop as the first step of a revolution/evolution. You can eventually, for example, start your own Magic Theater group, and the December workshop would be the beginning of that process.
The first basic proposition is: the mind cannot be charted or mapped. There is a simple reason why. It is being invented all the time.
If you were walking through a mansion snapping photographs for a museum show—but meanwhile a few hundred thousand workers were adding wings, you’d be in arrears forever.
In the mind, there is a self-generating Complaint Department. The way to deal with it is to embody the whole notion of complaints theatrically—to play out roles in dialogue in which the complainant and, for instance, a god or a personage who is beyond complaining act out these two roles…and then switch. This is quite fantastic in its implications. It isn’t so much about thinking or remembering as it is about ACTING. Acting a role has great potential to SATISFY WHAT IS ESSENTIALLY A THEATRICAL DESIRE.
In other words, complaining (or any other attitude) has a root in theater. As such, complaining doesn’t really MEAN very much; it signifies an attraction for a role. A person wants to play THE ROLE OF COMPLAINING. That’s the basic wish. He doesn’t want to live his life as a complainer in little dribbles—he wants to enact the role of someone who complains. Why? Because it’s a juicy role. Who wouldn’t want to play it?
But in life, he doesn’t get a chance to stretch out and really give that role a good workout. In the Magic Theater, he can.
There are a billion things a person can complain about. But that’s not the same thing as pouring real energy into the role.
When you look at it from this angle, you could say that any inner problem is nothing more (or less) than the unfulfilled desire to play a role.
And how exactly does what I’m talking about here cross over into the real world of money, politics, oppression, revolution, poverty, love, hate…
If you’re willing to look at some of the figures who have led the fight to unseat controlling elites, you’ll often find people who can’t get out of their own way, can’t stop doing the very thing they’re railing against, can’t, in other words, seek genuine change.
And they are, on some level, in need of THEATER. They need to mount a personal revolution. They need a stage on which they can emerge from their own frustration—otherwise, in the world, they will just bring more doom. It happens, over and over.
Where do you think private, secret, personal agendas come from?
You can look at the whole world on a barometer of ZERO THEATER all the way to INFINITE THEATER.
In Magic-Theater improvised dialogues, you have the opportunity to try out various roles and satisfy the buried desire to expand expression through imagination. You’re not shackled to one role. You’re not just following one narrow track through life wishing you could break out.
If the whole world was dark all the time, somebody would imagine light. Well, the whole world is trying to behave as if it is un-theatrical—so it’s natural that somebody would invent wide-ranging unlimited improvised theater. That’s what Jacob Moreno did nearly a hundred years ago, when he created Psychodrama. That is the core from which the Magic Theater springs.
Think of any obsession, preoccupation, problem, internal morass. What is going on there is: THE PERSON WANTS TO PLAY THAT ROLE. AND HE WANTS TO PLAY AS WELL SOME COUNTER TO IT. HE WANTS TO PLAY SOMEONE WHO IS BEYOND THAT PROBLEM.
That’s why the problem exists in the first place—because he isn’t playing the role to its fullest.
It’s all theater.
Jon Rappoport
To inquire about the Magic Theater workshop in San Diego on December 10-11: qjrconsulting@gmail.com