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Our inner voice not only speaks but also sings. We hear it in those songs that pop up in our minds from time to time – this is how the unconscious indicates what worries us, what we hide deep inside. Read the story of our correspondent about how the melody “heard” by the participants of psychological training revealed their common pain: the loss of old friends.
“Which of you is ready to share your inner melody?” the presenter asked. A minute earlier, we were all sitting with our eyes closed and doing a very strange task – trying to hear the music inside ourselves, to hear what the inner voice sings to us.
Everyone stepped forward and stood where they like to stand. It’s a little spiral. We started from the end. “It’s just that I live on Lenin Street, and it knocks me out from time to time,” a young man sang defiantly from the far corner near the door, beating the rhythm with his foot. “I don’t know how to live, to be like…” they said embarrassedly behind my back.
Then it was my turn, but for no apparent reason my inner voice mockingly sang “Am I to blame” … I was completely unprepared for such a repertoire, so I sang what was more decent – Okudzhava: “Your Majesty is a woman, how did you decide to me … ”Smiles of recognition ran across the faces, and I suddenly realized that I had chosen this song for a reason.
The stocky man sang very convincingly: “Don’t worry, be happy.” An inner voice told another girl that she would not say anything.
The next participant said: “I had several melodies spinning in my head at once: Summertime…” “sitting on a beautiful hill…” “…but you are a person, you are both strong and brave…” “…and that’s why I run along the road like that” …
A simple potpourri. Songs from our childhood, plus Boris Grebenshchikov from his student years, and some kind of sadness behind all this.
Thirty people came to the psychodrama, each with their own life story. Which of them will be chosen as the hero of the psychodrama is not known to the last. This will become known at the moment when the whole group gets up and approaches one of us, when dozens of hands lightly, barely audibly touch his shoulder. When it turns out that he spoke about the sadness that lived up to this moment in each of us.
About eternal friendship
We chose her. Let’s call her Nastya. Is there any meaning in the melodies that are just spinning in our heads? It only took us a minute or two to find out.
We sang these four songs one after another, remembering the words on the go, and the stage “second Nastya” – a participant she simply chose from the audience – showed what these songs were about for her. With a cigarette – under Grebenshchikov, a pioneer march under the “Adventures of Electronics”, together by the hand, as in a kindergarten …
“This is about an old friendship on the verge of breaking,” Nastya suddenly said. “Actually, this is my dearest and oldest friend. She did something that I perceive as a betrayal, and I need to tell her somehow, but I’m pulling everything.
And the fun took off from us like a hand.
Thus began psychodrama.
letter on the balcony
“Maybe you want to write her a letter?” the host asks.
– Maybe. But I don’t care if she gets it. I don’t care at all.
Where will you write it?
– On the balcony. I have such a small balcony, I like to sit and work there.
– What you need?
“Just an ashtray and a pen.
And, as in a kindergarten, a balcony appeared from two chairs in front of us. Nastya sits on one, in front of her is a girl with a large “ashtray”, which she rolled from a piece of golden organza. Behind, lightly touching the shoulder, sits the “second I”, and now her face is not at all impassive. She will speak instead of Nastya, in an incomprehensible way guessing her thoughts, feeling her state, even when Nastya herself does not have words.
This is my first time on psychodrama, but I completely dismiss the idea of getting a notebook and making notes for a report. We are all there, at the same time both on the stage and inside our own lives.
It does not happen
Nastya takes the pen and… can’t start. Thirty figures stood motionless in their places around. 30 pairs of eyes and complete silence.
– Hello, Yulia. I never thought that we would part with you, but it seems that the time has come. Because there are things that cannot be forgiven, excuse me, – Nastya begins with difficulty, and everyone around begins to cry. Quietly, pressing his palm to his face and changing one paper handkerchief after another.
Because it happens. This friend comes when everyone has betrayed you. She will call your home number for 20 minutes in a row, while you, after all the hacks, are standing at the door, and your child is fast asleep and there is no one else to open it. You can call her at any time and hear: “Well, come in.” And then something happens that crosses it all out.
I’m not crying. Over the past couple of years, I have watched how many friendships are literally being pulled into different orbits. Once we sang about a big secret for such a small company and knew that there is good and evil. Now we know that in fact both evil and good are relative, and who we are to judge. But something remains in us, which unmistakably determines: this is not possible.
It seems that at times some force out there wants to prove to us that we are not human. That in some circumstances we will still do something for which we cease to respect ourselves.
choir of angels
The psychodrama goes on for three hours, and all three hours we sit without moving. Five times I have to be Grebenshchikov, because it turned out that even a hundred years later I remember all the words. And every time I see what joy this song of our student years causes in Nastya’s eyes.
The heroine and her “I” change roles, new heroes appear – Anger (the same guy who sang about Lenin Street) and a thin girl – Sympathy. Sympathy complains about being completely forgotten, but after that it is sent to the farthest corner, and there it remains until the very end.
At some point, Nastya begins to hesitate, and Marina asks us all to sing on the same note, which our hero is now feeling. In some incomprehensible way, taking one note, our entire choir, consisting of ordinary participants in the training, sings with clear, angelic voices. There is a sound of such emotional power that it gives me goosebumps. As if we want to help, giving all our energy, to fix what, alas, you can’t fix.
Girlfriend Julia
Then they choose another heroine – that very friend Yulia, she turns out to be a girl with a cute round face. She is seated on a chair very far from the “balcony”, she sits with her back, hunched over, all alone, listens to everything that is said about her, and I feel sorry for her. Then they give her the floor, she gets up and slowly says: “I read your letter. You know, I knew you wouldn’t forgive me.” Nastya replies: “It’s not you, it’s me myself. I don’t know what’s happening to me. I don’t want to live. I want to destroy everything. And I break everything around, all relationships.
How they find the words, how the second “I” and the inner voice can repeat word for word what the heroine said before, is incomprehensible to me. But this is stronger than tragedy, although I am a theatergoer and I love opera. It is born before our eyes, and it has no script, just as we ourselves did not know an hour ago that we would all gather together in this audience and it would turn out that this drama is about all of us.
Do not worry be happy
How you want them to hug after that, but they continue to stand with their backs and then disperse.
Outside the windows of the auditorium, some unimaginable downpour begins, like in a movie, when you know that someone is standing on top with a hose, although the sun is actually shining. What song would help you right now? – Marina asks, and Nastya suddenly pulls a strong man out of the hall, who immediately draws in: “Don’t worry. Be happy”. Or maybe we really smile. Make a little effort on yourself, and everything will be fine.
The actor – the “second Nastya” hesitates and slightly noticeably beats the beat with his foot. Our time is coming to an end, after us there will be the next group here, and we must complete the action according to the rules of psychodrama – collect all the participants and step over the imaginary space where everything happened, go out into the world again. Nastya gathers everyone, the rhythm becomes clearer, and at some point it turns into a song … “Wait, locomotive.”
A small camp makes a semicircle and finds itself in the middle of the hall.
A friend is still sitting with her back to them. Sympathy sits sadly in the corner next to her.
A strong man who sang: “Don’t worry, be happy,” suddenly says: “You know, when we were walking in this funeral procession, with this song, for the first time in my life I wanted to resign.” He is a psychologist in fact, this participant in psychodrama, and quite famous, but I found out later.
Sympathy says, “I wish the blues sounded here.”
We all hoped for a miracle
It’s time for sharing. Almost everyone speaks. A friend who lives in another country leaves, and we have to go to say goodbye, but the disease has changed her so that it is no longer her … They quarreled to the nines on political grounds …
Why are they all leaving now? We can’t stop people from changing, we’ve had a tough time, I say. Changes start little by little, we just celebrate them, but forgive them in a friendly way. And then there are more and more of them, and by this time you are already far from each other. If one or two semantic components in a word have changed, it is already a different word.
We all hoped for a miracle to the last, but psychodrama is born from a combination of all our stories, everything is like in life here – and apparently, this is how everything in our lives is now. Or do friends come when it’s hard, and then they dissolve into thousands of people around, each of whom is able, having come here, to put a hand on your shoulder and feel your pain and help?
Then we discuss what the training gave everyone. “I realized that everything I sing is for a reason,” a stocky man suddenly says. And I come home, find a screwdriver and finally take apart and take out from the balcony a locker that two students once bought and brought to an empty apartment to live happily ever after.
The host of this workshop is Marina Bebik, psychodramatherapist, dance and movement therapist.
“Psychodrama is a method of action. This is important, since many people understand that something needs to be changed in life, but it is difficult and scary to take the first steps. The psychodramatic method allows you to try new solutions in action in a safe environment. The idea to combine music and psychodrama was suggested to me a couple of years ago by my one of the first teachers of psychodrama Elena Lopukhina. She knew that I was engaged in music, offered to combine it with psychodrama. I conducted the workshop “Musical Psychodramatic Chorus: Voice – Return of Power” as an experimental laboratory, combining psychodrama with operatic art. The results exceeded expectations.
Sound is also movement. We can say that the power of voice is the power of movement. Improvisation on the theme of opera singing at the beginning of the training awakened the energy needed for action. And singing was a great opportunity to warm up and include the whole group in the psychodramatic action. After the seminar, the songs were sung for several more days, the participants of the workshop shared that the melodies sound inside, new ones appear, and the voice gains strength!”