Iulia Benze was sponsored by Reboot The Roots to attend a festival in Hungary to present …
The Alternative Series Workshops Reboot The Roots in Cserhatszentivan, Hungary, July 2015
2nd of July: 8 participants. We worked in a very small room, in an old house and I had to adapt the exercises of Identity Deconstruction for that old living room (it was an old traditional living room), with lamp hanging down from the middle of the ceiling.
We started with everyone introducing themselves and talking about any injuries as well, as a mean of preparing them for what it will come and assuming responsibility. It followed up by a warm-up session and a game throwing a shoe to each other and calling our colleagues by name in the same time.
We continued with Barba Sticks, everybody was extremely careful with each other but in the same time enjoying the task very much. I went with all the participants through the instruction of this exercise. I allocated a longer training into this to D., who later on told me he was autistic and how much this experience helped him so much.
After working with discipline and staccato movements, I wanted to relax the atmosphere with fluid dance like movements through Grotowski movements which turned into trans improv contact dance and I was very pleased to see that from our first session participants weren’t shy to interact/touch while flowing in the space. That created a beautiful balance with what we did earlier.
Going in the same direction, we also tackled the exercise of Positive Energy Cycle (positive argue-justify) and it revealed a lot of aspects to some participants.
We ended our four hour session with meditation and discussions regarding what we did, felt or learnt.
In the end, we managed very well to work and fill the space, the room gave us a certain intimacy, in fact it forced every one of us to continue moving and to enjoy the proximity of our partners, and it facilitated some really intense and high perspiration level sessions, leaving participants wanting and asking for more hours in the session per day.
Some of them told me that our first session of Alternative Series of Workshops just made them change their mind about going back home from the festival, which was predominantly based on concerts, as they weren’t enjoying it very much because of the lack of theatre experiences. So I was very pleased to see that, as an artist, first time facilitating these workshops by myself, I managed to offer to participants some fulfilling experiences that made them change their minds about leaving and also spread the word about the intense work we are doing; at the end of the festival, many people approached me intrigued about what we were doing, asking information, some of them giving it go, some of them not, some just coming with outside personal issues thinking that they can be resolved with a session of workshops. Little they knew though that this requires a longer process!
