What Are We Doing? Let's figure It Out, Together...

What is He doing? What are THEY doing? What are WE doing?

I am sure many people around the world have been asking themselves that in varying degrees of anger, disbelief, and fear, as the Israel-US-Iran war horrifically unfolds.

We could also ask what we might do to shift the source, the deep why, of what is occurring in front of our eyes and around us, without entering overwhelm.

My life’s journey has led me to shift from soldier to peace activist. I feel it is encouraging and important to see people go out and call for peace and an end to war, yet the activism I am currently engaged with is not about outward gesturing or calling out what is right and wrong. What resonates with me is to find a key to shift from within, because to stop the war outside, we need to stop whatever is fueling it from the inside. This requires healing the collective fabric we inhabit, now and before.

This journey is both personal and collective. It is one where we touch, together, the various parts of ourselves, where we make visible that which is moving around us.

It requires a practice of witnessing, of seeing the complex, yet simple, web of life.

The Journey Towards this SPACE of Practice

Surveys across ten countries found that 75% of young respondents believe the future is frightening. 91% of Gen Z experienced a physical or emotional symptom due to stress. I share these figures with the university students who join my newspaper theatre and Theatre That Reconnects courses for social workers. I feel it is important that when we feel overwhelmed, we remember: this is not a personal failure of resilience. This is all of us carrying the weight of a world. This is the stuck we are in on together.

Otto Scharmer often speaks to how we collectively create results nobody wants. I feel the answer to this question lies in the disconnect from ourselves, from each other, and most importantly from the living world, from the earth beneath our feet. In our disconnection, we do not see what we actually need, let alone move toward it together.

I came into this path first via meeting the Theatre of the Oppressed as an activist. Boal’s work gave me a fundamentally new vision of theatre, seeing it as a space where we can rehearse changing the situations that oppress us. I believed in it then. I still do.

Yet it also felt incomplete. I sense external oppression and inner landscape were not two separate things. That the systems pressing down on people from outside had gotten inside, into our nervous systems, into self-worth, and even more into our collective capacity to imagine differently. I felt that I was given tools, but with a guide.

In 2015, I came across Theory U and Social Presencing Theater after joining the first u.lab MOOC, on the recommendation of a friend with whom I was co-creating the Theatre for Transition Learning Village, in central Italy.

My first SPT course in Berlin in July 2015 opened doors for me that I could not have even imagined before. I was already a Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner and facilitator, and on the surface, many of the practices seemed kind of similar. And yet the place from which they were operating, and the way they touched the source of brokenness I was carrying, was different. What has been revealed to me powerfully through the encounter with Theory U and then SPT was how complex and interwoven external oppression is not only with the inner landscape of an individual, but with the collective and ancestral timelines that weave our collective social bodies.

In that sense, SPT is also clearly a spiritual practice, one rooted deeply in Buddhism and active dharma sources, the wisdom of the Buddha, and the Shambala warrior prophecies. It is that quality of staying with holding that empty space, that ma for the broken and stuck feelings, it is when we witness that can allow movement to appear.

That same year, a year of vision and possibility for me, I traveled to Senegal for the first time and had a powerful experience with fellow travellers and artists from around the country. I experienced the COP21 as an artist and activist in Paris, in an occupied social building. That same year, with my partner Ilaria Olimpico and TheAlbero Collective, we set out on the “In the Name of the Mother” research journey. It is when I started to dive deeper and translate the Work That Reconnects, as described by Joanna Macy, weaving it into my Theatre of the Oppressed as I understand it, and becoming Theatre That Reconnects: an ongoing journey of becoming, of bringing into relationship ways of being and seeing the world.

Joanna Macy spent decades pointing to something most of us have been conditioned to avoid: our pain for the world is real, it is healthy, and it needs to be honored rather than suppressed. Grief, anger, and fear for the world, when they are not acknowledged, we freeze. This leads us to numbness, anxiety, and overwhelm.

The places where we are each stuck are collective, and we can only shift together. It is when we sit together with what Macy calls the “bittersweet” quality of this kind of work: the recognition that real insight often arrives alongside real grief, and that this is not a problem to fix but a sign that something genuine is touching us.

That underneath our fear, there is courage. Underneath our sadness, there is love. Underneath our anger, there is a sense of justice. And underneath and around our confusion, there is faith. That behind our greatest despair, there is everlasting hope.

All of this is a journey of practice, all of this is a pathway to reconnect.

Theatre That Reconnects is a collective space of inquiry and an emerging “ecology of practice and inquiry”, a weaving of three fields of practice. In order to support this emerging practice, I have started to hold and co-facilitate a monthly space for the growing community of practitioners, facilitators, and curious people who come together to practice and explore Theatre That Reconnects.

We start with a short check-in and context building, then move to a grounding. Anyone who joins the meeting and feels the call to do it, regardless of experience, can guide it. This act of trust is part of the spirit of the space — of practicing and learning through doing, and sometimes through making mistakes, creating and opening space for possibility. We explore the map, which is at the core of the work and is still unfolding and developing. It serves to ground us as we enter the practice space.

It is an invitation to sense collectively present and to follow what is alive.

All are invited to bring their own explorations into this collective field.

We meet every last Thursday of the month. It is a gift economy space, pay what you want or can. Find the next session on our Luma page or on ImaginAction’s website.

JOIN THE SPACE