venerdì 6 aprile 2012

Leadership and Team Building in Group Theatre

Generally, in art the creative process is made by the artist as an individual. Generally, the arts are based on an individual creative work. Painters, musicians, playwrighters, poets.

Instead, the theater, especially the so-called "Third Theatre", made by the theater groups, those which Eugenio Barba calls "floating islands", moves according to a different dynamic and approach. 

In this case the creative process is made through participation, intervention, the mixing of all the diversities that constitute the identity of the group.
Generally there is a director who is also chief of the group. It's the one who decides, who develops the strategies, who determines the line of creative development and, where miraculously happens, also makes possible the development of personality, consciousness, knowledge of the different members of the group. He should also worry about the proper functioning of the interactions among group members, to solve conflicts, to allow the formation of synergies within the work, to constantly grow the spirit of belonging to the group, its vision, its mission.

Since the contemporary theater is not based on the typical distinction: playwrighter, director, actors. But the group is or should be an ideal combination of common purposes, which will have to find a proper connection and balance with the personal goals of each member of the group.

It’s hard work, and it becomes more and more difficult with decreasing of socio-cultural ideals, of artistic vocations, that characterized the '60s - '80s, and the growth of individualism increasingly rigid and unwilling to question, or rather to put in game, their personal ideas, values
​​and needs.

In this sense it is considered necessary a very specific and detailed work to develop the capacities for real integration of each member of the group. There are two basic lines of work.
The creation of a real leadership ability, to each member of the group.
A rigorous work of team building, allowing the knowledge and application of those techniques of interpersonal relationship that can lead to constructive joint action, both towards the realization of a valid creative product, and especially an organic and harmonious development of the structure itself.

So many groups are melting because of the inability to work together. Apparently conflicts, which look impossible to solve, can destroy the potential, the heritage, the culture and the history itself of an artistic group. Or at least they strongly reduce its creative strenght.

It is said that art has to save the life. Grotowski ends his adventure saying that the only one who can try to save is himself. But I believe that you can save yourself (giving a sense to yourself) only by saving others.

The relational and artistic aspects can and have to coexist. Especially in this reality where the only real hope of salvation seems to find itself in Beauty and Harmony of the Differences, as in the last image of Fellini’s movie "8 ½ ": the great circle of humanity (group), where all the people held the other’s hand.

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