Monologues to Change the World/ Israeli and Palestinian Peace Monologues

I am very excited that I have hired Bruce MacIntosh to help me by organizing and posting all my videos from shows over the last ten-twelve years.

Yesterday, he put up about 24 videos from 2 shows I did with young woman from Israel and Palestine at a peace camp. Each one tells their powerful and true story.

We worked with these girls writing and performing their monologues in 3 languages (Hebrew, Arabic, English) in 3 days. Yes, from the time they sat down to create their monologues til the time they stood in front of packed audiences here in Santa Fe, we had three days to facilitate this.

It was wild and amazing and ultimately very empowering for the girls, many who stated on their camp forms that standing onstage with "the enemy", being deeply heard, receiving flowers and standing ovations together was the highlight of their time in the US.

Please check out the videos below as a sampling of the work.

On this same You Tube channel (Tanya Rubinstein) you can sit back and listen to some powerful stories from the heart of Jerusalem and Gaza.

This December I will be traveling to do monologues with this same population of people on the soil of the conflict...in Israel and Palestine.

What Makes a Great Therapeutic Monologue Facilitator?

As many people are expressing interest in training in the Therapeutic Monologue Process I offer, I thought I'd write a bit about what it takes to be a great facilitator in this work.

Successful facilitators need to do a great deal of preparation in order to facilitate the process. The first step is going through the process of writing and performing a therapeutic monologue in front of an audience. No one who has not walked through the process themselves has the “inner authority” to facilitate in my opinion, even if, as a therapist or other healing professional, they have the ability to hold space for others. Then, they need to facilitate a group under supervision and receive detailed feedback about their in the moment relationship to the participants and their stories. In an ideal world, the facilitators would have a strong background in acting/solo performance themselves, personal writing, be trained as a therapist as well as having a direct experience with their own Divine Nature. That, however would be an unusual person. All people I have trained as facilitators who are attracted to this work have at least some of these qualities or backgrounds. It is also possible and quite desirable to have two facilitators working together, one with more of a writing/theater background and one with more or a therapeutic background to collaborate. Knowing or having touched one’s own Divine nature supersedes the rest of the qualities. This direct experience prepares the facilitator to not buy into the victim or perpetrator story. This background allows the facilitator to sit and listen deeply and open heartedly yet without painful attachment  to people’s traumatic experiences which may include everything from rape to wartime experience to the loss of a child. It does not make the facilitator callus, but rather compassionate. This is not about dogma or imposing any belief systems on the group. Rather, it is simply the faith in knowing that something bigger than oneself is holding the energy of the group. From this place of deep knowing, an infinite container is created that can hold and transform any story from pain to wisdom, trauma to acceptance . This ability to create this container from a place of spiritual knowing is the facilitators greatest asset and indeed a necessity to do the deepest level of healing work.

Solo Performances: A Tool for Social Justice/ A Tool for Healing

here is a great movement underway in the theater  and simultaneously in the healing community. It has been a long time coming, yet in essence returns us to our deepest community roots from our ancestral egalitarian society’s. We are reclaiming our roles as storytellers, as Hero’s on a journey home, as social justice commentators, as jesters and shamans. In the contemporary theater, we are doing this through the vehical of “The Solo Show”.

The solo show that I am speaking of is the one person show that is conceived of, written by and performed by one man or one woman. It is a show that is the most holistic form of theater as it is born and manifested from one person’s deepest vision. It goes beyond conventional theater in terms of intimacy because the story, experience and perspective is created by the performer.

For me, it has been the richest and most empowering journey I have taken in my lifetime and I have devoted my self the exploration of this form. I have written and performed my own shows, directed and produced countless other solo shows and been a teacher and coach in the development of solo shows. Additionally, I have created and implemented a process to utilize contemporary monologues as a therapeutic form with populations of people with cancer, AIDS, mental illness and survivers of emotional, physical and sexual abuse. There is no form that I have found that has the possibility of being a more powerful testement to the human spirit that the solo show. On a profound level, it is about the willingness to show up onstage and reveal our humanity to one another.

Unlike the artifice inherent in traditional theater, this is no smoke and mirrors euphimism. Solo Performance is based on the direct experience of the performer him or herself. It is based on real life experiences. The emotional story is the performer’s story one way or another, every time. This includes documentary theater such as Anna Deveare Smith and Danny Hoch who are choosing their subjects for interview.It is their personal point of view and choice to frame particular subjects in a particular way that shows us who they are.