Giocare il sogno, filmare il gioco (1990)

A workshop by Ottavio Rosati for the Teatro Stabile of Turin realizes the project of Psicocinema J. L. Moreno and Roberto Rossellini A hundred years ago, in Bucharest, Jacob Levi Moreno was born, the inventor of psychodrama and psychocinema. The word is abused, particularly dear to black reporters, however used in everyday language. Moreno's psychodrama is instead an action-based group psychotherapy: in the term the drama suffix (from drama, theater) has taken the place of analysis. Freud's sofa has been transported to a real or imaginary stage. The purely verbal communication is flanked by the theatrical work based on doing and not only on saying, on the representation and on the stories of patient-actors, on the distribution of roles and on body language, on play. Playing the Dream, Filming the Game: the Teatro Stable in Turin, directed by Luca Ronconi, celebrates the centenary of the birth of Moreno with two workshops by Ottavio Rosati on the relationship between psychodrama and cinema (will be held on May 4th, 5th and 6th and the first three days of June). Playing the dream: professional actors such as Alessandro Haber will also participate in the groups, entrusted with the theatrical interpretation of dreams. Filming the game: the workshops will be entirely filmed by three television crews for a project of scientific documentaries entrusted to Raitre. The funding of the Piedmont region allows free enrollment open to young psychologists, educators and researchers active in the field of entertainment and communication. The Turin Solidarity Center will host the laboratories and its participants. The experiment is conceived and directed by Ottavio Rosati. It is not just a matter of deciphering verbal images and associations, as in psychoanalysis, explains the director. In psychodrama, the therapist is the director who stages the traumatic events, the dreams, the fantasies of patients-authors-actors. And since acting is more direct than verbal narration, the unconscious dimension of discourse becomes evident. For the psychodramatic actor the plot to represent is not outside him, but in him. As in Pirandello's Six Characters: And where is the script? It's in us, sir. So much fanfare Rosati notes for a trivial book like Seduction on the Crib, the diary of a patient who has a love story with her analyst. - Between the cold neutrality of traditional analytical interpretation and the misunderstanding of sexual encounter the space of therapeutic acting out is found. I am referring to the game, to the possibility of acting in space, interacting in groups, sharing existential experiences, also making use of the body and the matter. Coming out of the strictly psychological and therapeutic field, psychodrama techniques and theories have more or less directly influenced theater and cinema. Certainly Moreno's work has contributed to the formation of radical theater experiences such as that of the Living Theater and of acting schools like that of Lee Strasberg. And as in the case of Freud and Schnitzler those of Moreno and Pirandello were autonomous, but absolutely analogous paths. By now even the most austere Freudians have abandoned their initial resistance to psychodrama. Already in the fifties, Cesare Musatti transgressed the canonical immobility of the cot and ventured some psychodrama experiments in the company of Franco Fornari. "The only time in my life that I believed was a heart attack," Musatti confessed in an interview. "I had to do the role of the bad father and my colleagues, who assisted, were frightened because I altered myself, I banged my fist on the table shouting: 'I am the master!' Do you understand? " (La Repubblica, April 28, 1990)