Psychodrama Training Residential: "All the World's a Stage" (4 days)

with Hilde Knottenbelt and Martin Putt

Creating dramas one step at a time gives a group leader the means to work with the emerging life of the group in a structured, poetic and elastic manner.

Foregrounding dramatic elements in the production of dramas can bring life and fluidity to the psyche. For example, the details of scene setting may evoke eras, allude to values, hold meanings, convey emotion, offer surprises, and induce an increasing sense of presence and engagement in the participants.

In this unscripted form of drama, a co-creation between director, protagonist and auxiliaries evolves. Participants are called on to feel, perceive, and enter into the subjective experiences of others. This deeply collaborative, relational process offers opportunities for experimentation, reengagement, and a context in which to relate to the complexities and breadth of contemporary life.  

Over the 4 days we will create a focus on:

•      Bringing a dramatic sensibility to the work of producing enactments

•      Immediacy and creative play

•      Our bodies as expressive instruments

•      Patterns of living and liberation from these patterns

•      The development of attunement and discernment in auxiliary work

This will come about through engaging in the group process, through movement and voice work, through auxiliary work, through dramas and through supervised practice, discussion and writing.

This training event is for core, intermediate and advanced trainees engaged in psychodrama training in Australia and overseas.

Martin Putt

Martin is a Psychodramatist & Trainer Educator Practitioner-in-training (TEPit) on the staff of Psychodrama Aotearoa New Zealand Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. He is a registered psychotherapist working in private practice with a wide range of clients, mostly boys and men. He has served as Secretary and is the immediate past-President of AANZPA. Before becoming a psychotherapist, Martin's background included working as an actor in a touring theatre-in-education company, theatre improvisation, especially Playback Theatre, and working with young people in both a community youth centre and as a children's hospital play-specialist. He is a proud graduate of the John Bolton Theatre School in Melbourne and he values the playfulness, soulfulness and creativity of psychodrama in groups, in individual sessions, and in training. 

Hilde Knottenbelt

Hilde is a Psychodramatist and Trainer, Educator, Practitioner (TEP). She is the Executive Director of Psychodrama Australia, and the training group coordinator at Psychodrama Australia’s Melbourne Campus, where she has been a trainer since 2000. She has over 40 years' experience as a teacher, trainer and educator in experiential learning, including in the creative arts. She works in private practice as a counsellor, supervisor and voice coach and teaches vocal improvisation and storytelling in groups in the community. Hilde first worked with Martin when they were performers in Melbourne’s Living Stories Playback Theatre Company.

Detailed workshop description coming soon.