According to the dictionary of Cambridge, the theater is “the art or activity of writing and performing plays, or the public performance of plays.” It is an art form where expression has a predominant place, and more specifically the sharing of emotions. As stated by Claire Schrader, writer and blogger in the field of personal development, the discovery of theater “…opened a whole realm of possibilities, enabled [her] to feel more confident and also to explore hidden aspects of [her]self”.
Open, enable, build confidence, explore, share. Five keywords that transmit the benefits of theater: let us discuss them in order to explore what theater can bring to our mental balance.
Open
A problem for many people, including those struggling with their mental health, is their limited field of discovery. As a result, their life becomes narrow and monotonous. They are rarely engaged in creative or social activities, their social circle gets smaller and their cognitive capacities decrease. To make them want to learn, experiment, or discover something new, they need to open their personal bubble, but how? This is barely a universal solution to this question, but one of the ways is creating initiatives that aim at expanding the horizons of people, such as the Stage of Mind project, inviting a group of people struggling with their mental health to participate in a theater group and jointly creating a theatre play. As simple as it may seem, the life of many people has taken a different direction after discovering theater).
Enable
The Greeks created the word catharsis. They were convinced that theater was an essential element of their civilization. Why? Because emotions need a space to be expressed, otherwise we might lead a life we don’t really want to, driven by contradictory impulses.
Usually, people don’t allow themselves to spontaneously express their emotions: many barriers are set that find their origins in social rules set on us since we are children. Theater teaches us how to enable ourselves again (as we did as small children) to give a concrete form to our emotions. This might be a difficult exercise because, at first, the theater stage doesn’t look different from other places of our daily life. Similar to what happens in a religious context, that place needs to be sacred to the individual, so that he would apply other laws apply to it. But, most importantly, this is a place created by other human beings who felt the need to express their emotions or watch others expressing them.
Build confidence
What comes next? Confidence might spring out of this exercise. After expressing deep emotions, on the stage or off the stage, people realize that the world keeps spinning around and that it wasn’t such a big deal. Therefore, they learn how to accept themselves in all their complexity — as complexity is not necessarily a contradiction.
This confidence has the capacity to be deported in many other aspects of life, from intimate relationships to professional life, and it allows one to lead their life with a higher sense of responsibility and control.
Explore
The theater is a never-ending discipline, and the notion of exploring inevitably brings to the mind images of Columbus on the sea or antic Egyptians watching the sky. Emotion is a mere word, but the reality behind it is as diverse as the stars in the universe– giant, colorful, and unique. Exploring our emotions grows our self-knowledge and is always gratifying, no matter the fact that some of them we may consider difficult or negative– all of them are ours and it’s good to acknowledge them. With this exploration comes the evidence that we are bigger than we thought, and that it is possible to share all kinds of things without being afraid of another person’s judgment.
Share
Sharing is the purpose of all art, although it more specifically takes the form of physical and corporal expression in theater. It is an ability that might develop if our emotions remain distant or unknown. This is why self-knowledge is important in all fields of existence, and precisely, accompanying people on their road to introspection might be one of the theater’s greatest contributions to humanity.
Inspired by Claire Schrader’s article:
