Workshop Series

Thursday 9 April - Thursday 11 June 2009
The Quaker Meeting House, Edinburgh

On-Line Ticket Sales

 

Event: Workshop Series: Role-Play and Improvisation: A Pathless Path to Peace.
Facilitator: Lee Gershuny, Ph.D., Artistic Director of The Elements World Theatre.
Organiser: Jointly organized by the Edinburgh International Centre for Spirituality and Peace, EICSP, Scottish Charity SC038996, and, The Elements World Theatre, a company limited by guarantee and registered in Scotland No. 283766, Scottish Charity SC022072.
Venue: Meeting Room, Quaker Meeting House, 7 Victoria Terrace, Edinburgh, EH1 2JL.
Dates: Thursdays, 9, 16, 23, 30 April, 7, 14, 21, 28 May, and 4, 11 June 2009.
Time: Registration: 6.30pm-7pm. Workshop: 7pm-9pm.
Event Description: 10 weekly workshops, 2 hours each.




The purpose of this workshop series is to enable participants to make a culture of peace sustainable in their own lives. The series is based on the observation that:

1. Practicing peace locally in our daily lives empowers us individually and collectively.
2. Conflict, an inevitable part of life, holds the seeds of our own spiritual and creative development and the energy to sustain it.
3. Developing natural creativity, a universal and inexhaustible human resource, enables us to realize our highest aspirations and deepest dreams.
 

Workshop Series: Role-Play and Improvisation: Poster

Role-Play and Improvisation provide a flexible, creative approach to non-violent communication and conflict facilitation. They enable us to tap inner sources of creativity, playfulness and wisdom without using force, threat, pressure or abuse. This trial and error approach enables us to discover new ways of achieving our goals with less effort. 

By playing different roles, we not only allow ourselves to experience another person’s perspective, but also experience our own and the other’s diversity more clearly.  Improvisation enables us to let go of pre-conceptions and one-sided answers to whatever obstacle or conflict we may face and perceive ourselves and the other as though for the first time. Together, role-play and improvisation have the potential to deepen our experience of inner peace and democracy in action.

The whole series of workshops is experiential and interactive. Each workshop will provide opportunities to become more aware of the different roles we play – the ones we like and identify with as well as those we may dislike and marginalize. We will also have opportunities to stop in the midst of conflict and silently reflect on our experience and make choices based on what’s most important to us in the moment. 

This series of workshops offers a supportive, non-judgmental environment with discussion, demonstrations, movement, sharing, role-play and improvisation exercises in large and small groups. In the process, we may discover new insights and actions for peacemaking in our daily lives and create a pathless path to peace.

Each week the workshop will focus on a different theme in a peacemaking process:  

1) Choosing and prioritising
2) Being present, Being peace
3) Working creatively with conflict
4) Peacemaking as a martial art
5) Retreat is not defeat
6) Tapping inner sources of creativity, playfulness and wisdom
7) Crisis as a moment of power
8) Stopping in the midst of conflict
9) There’s always another way to do anything
10) Reflecting on A Pathless Path – next steps

Lee Gershuny, Ph.D., award-winning playwright in both the USA and UK, is also an internationally published poet and founder/Artistic Director of The Elements World Theatre Company. She has developed new forms of theatre and facilitated creative development workshops with a diversity of participants in England, Germany, Mexico, Poland, Scotland and the USA including professional artists, youth, older people, primary school children, people with physical and learning difficulties, homeless people, survivors of physical and substance abuse, users of mental health services, refugees and adults with physical and learning difficulties.

She is a founding member of the Research Society of Process-Oriented Psychology/UK and has designed and facilitated workshops in creative conflict facilitation in local, national and international festivals and conferences, including the Alternative G8 Summit (Edinburgh 2005), the SUBUD World Congress (Innsbruck, 2005), the World Youth Congress (Stirling 2005), International Civicus Youth Assembly (Glasgow 2008) and the MESP from 2004 to the present. 
Cost: £8/£6 (Concessions) per workshop,
£60/£40 (Concessions) for the 10 week series of workshops. For a Registration Form:
Contact: Neill Walker, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , 0131 331 4469.