Rainbow of Desire Workshop Saturday March 16th 2013

A dozen-plus people came together at the Rotunda in West Philadelphia in this one-day workshop: The Rainbow of Desire.   We spent the morning playing getting to know each other through a series of games that loosened up the senses and pushed at our comfort zones, then went into to some deeper work after lunch before moving on to the Rainbow of Desire technique.  Here's a list of the activities we used in the morning:

• Writing Our Desires:  As people arrived, each wrote down what they desired from the workshop on an index card, then boiled that down to one word.  We later used these words in another activity.
• Expression Circle:  A name game to get acquainted and get the body active.
• Walks:  Starting, stopping, moving quickly and slowly, making movements large and small, playing with proximity, eye contact, making oppositional movements and mirroring.
• Machines:  We used a "generic" machine as an example, then made machines based on single-word desires from peoples index cards.
• Image of the Word:  Again, taking single-word the desires from people index cards, people formed small group sculpture-poems.
• Colombian Hypnosis:  We played this quintessential Theatre of the Oppressed game to get ourselves thinking, talking and feeling out dynamics of power and oppression.

After lunch, we went into the following:

• Blind Tracker:  In pairs, one person plays a sighted animal, guiding their blind tracker through the darkness with only a single sound.
• Technique: Mask of the Oppressor:  For a description, see Augusto Boal's book, Games for Actors and Non-actors.
• Technique: Rainbow of Desire  For a description, see Augusto Boal's book of the same name.  In our version from this session, everyone ended up onstage to participate in a single person's story—half in the role of the protagonist's family members, half in the role of desires from the protagonist's own mind.
• The Glass Cobra:  Another blind walking game in which the whole group breaks apart and then tries to put itself back together again...

To book a workshop, send an email to "tophilly@gmail.com"