The 2025 Psychodrama Training Program in Sydney commences in March.
There will be 4 stand-alone workshops:
- Sat 15 & Sun 16 March, (2 days),
- Fri 16, Sat 17 & Sun 18 May (3 days),
- Sat 5 & Sun 6 July (2 days), and
- Fri 19, Sat 20 & Sun 21 September (3 days).
And 5 Open Nights
Fri 14 Feb, Fri 14 March, Fri 4 July, Thurs 18 Sept and Fri 7 November.
Please ensure you are on the mailing list to get further information about the program as soon as it becomes available.
For 2025 enquiries contact Rollo Browne (0417 682 085) or Bona Anna (0451 046 928).
Upcoming Events
The best way to understand the power of psychodrama is to experience it.
These evenings are designed to give you an opportunity to experience psychodrama in a safe and gentle environment. Each session will be directed by an experienced psychodramatist with time available for questions about the method and its applications.
Come and join in or sit and watch as the drama unfolds. Experience the power of action methods and gain new perspectives on the way we relate in today’s world.
The three stages of the double, the mirror and role reversal, from birth to approximately 5 years, describe Moreno’s foundational sequence for human development. The corresponding techniques of doubling, mirroring and role reversal emerged from Moreno’s theatrical experiments with role playing and spontaneity in the 1920s. At that time, he knew that his psychodramatic methods worked, but not why they worked. His subsequent insight was that the therapeutic effectiveness of these techniques is because they “are profoundly related to the dynamics of human growth” (Moreno 1952 in Fox, 1987:136).
The best way to understand the power of psychodrama is to experience it.
These evenings are designed to give you an opportunity to experience psychodrama in a safe and gentle environment. Each session will be directed by an experienced psychodramatist with time available for questions about the method and its applications.
Come and join in or sit and watch as the drama unfolds. Experience the power of action methods and gain new perspectives on the way we relate in today’s world.
The art of psychodrama comes to fruition in the work of the director. The director functions to bring about the close-to-real-life portrayal of the protagonist’s subjective world, so that it becomes a springboard for their spontaneity, insight and creative intervention. In this regard, the director can be viewed as having three inter-related functions: the producer, the social investigator and the therapeutic guide.
In this workshop, we will focus on the function of the therapeutic guide, including identifying therapeutic interventions, managing auxiliaries, selecting what to respond to and why, and identifying the underlying principles involved, all the while remaining responsive to whatever is occurring on the psychodrama stage.
The best way to understand the power of psychodrama is to experience it.
These evenings are designed to give you an opportunity to experience psychodrama in a safe and gentle environment. Each session will be directed by an experienced psychodramatist with time available for questions about the method and its applications.
Come and join in or sit and watch as the drama unfolds. Experience the power of action methods and gain new perspectives on the way we relate in today’s world.
Current and Past Events
This training will assist participants in developing leadership abilities in all situations and to integrate learning done in the group to their daily life – work, play and relationships – with a view to increasing their capacity to rise creatively to life’s challenges.
Learning to apply the systemic action process known as the psychodrama method is grounded in workshop events and participants’ interests.
Psychodrama is known as the Theatre of Truth, in that we explore the ‘truth’ by dramatic methods. One of the capacities of the method is that it recognises the powerful human need to live an authentic life, to be congruent in our being across all domains of life. It calls on us to live our truth, to embody it as we feel it and bring this into relationship, at work, play, and in community. In authenticity we have more capacity to change, to do the work that matters to us. In this way we grow.
This training workshop will focus on three areas to embody experience:
- Interview of the protagonist,
- Interview for role,
- Scene setting.
These three areas assist the practitioner to bring individuals’ concerns to life through timely application of psychodramatic action techniques. The content of scenes set out dramatically will arise out of the experiential sessions over the three-day training workshop and the warm up to action.
In this training workshop, the content will be based on participants’ interests, concerns and purposes. The focus will be on experiential sessions applied to daily life including work, play and relationships, with a view to increasing the capacity to rise creatively to life’s challenges. The experiential, systemic, action process known as the psychodrama method is also learnt in the process.
Sociodrama brings life to the questions that a group or community is grappling with. Using action methods, the group investigates the social system to gain a broader and deeper experiential understanding of the dynamics at play. The sociodrama director encourages group members to warm up to the different roles in the system, so that stereotyping is minimised and the essential motivations and concerns of all parties are portrayed. Through the concretisation of the system and the enactment of relevant scenarios, group members experience the system from these different viewpoints and new responses become possible.
Shine Like The Sun:
Recognising Role Conflict, Embracing Role Integration and Valuing Role Development
It requires, for most of us, courage and trust in our spontaneity to lead a group or direct a psychodrama. As Max Clayton (1992:1) notes, in these moments we are negotiating two powerful forces that exist in an uneasy and dynamic relationship:
‘an inner urge to grow, to live fully in the moment, to experience purpose and meaning, to create ideals and live by them, and a contradictory desire for safety, the avoidance of the unknown and of appearing odd or different, the fear of letting go outdated roles and developing progressive roles’.
The aim of this workshop is that you, as trainee directors and group leaders, will increasingly live in the progressive roles that you have developed to date, that you will recognise role conflict, embrace role integration and value role development, that you will, in Pink Floyd’s words, ‘shine like the sun’ (Shine On You Crazy Diamond, 1975).
Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun.
And you will know that, in psychodrama, as in life, being young is a matter of spontaneity flow...
Jacob Moreno explored the roots of creativity in human evolution, philosophically and above all experientially. These sessions will be applied to daily life including work, play and relationships, with a view to increasing the capacity to rise consciously and creatively to life’s challenges. The experiential, systemic, action process known as the psychodrama method is also learnt in the process.
At the heart of psychodrama is spontaneity, ‘a readiness for a free and vital response to the emerging moment’[1]. Spontaneity is imbued with both the creative (vital, flexible, free-flowing, new) and the relational (responsive, here and now, purposeful). All these qualities are essential to the production of a psychodrama. The more spontaniety we bring as a director producing an enactment, or as an auxiliary producing a relationship, the more we assist the protagonist to bring the enactment to life and for new responses to emerge.
In this workshop we will experiment, using improvisation, imagination and metaphor, to bring spontaneity to enactments. There will be a focus on:
· Playing with improvisation routines that build warm-up to fuller expression,
· Recognising the difference between impulsivity and intuition,
· Translating intuition into action, and
· Producing metaphor to step aside from a problem-solution paradigm.
This training workshop is suitable for people who want to develop their use of psychodramatic action methods in their work as educators, coaches, trainers, therapists and group workers. People with experience in psychodrama and those new to the method, are welcome.
An evening of Psychodrama with Rollo Browne.
The founder of Psychodrama, JL Moreno, famously said that rather than analyse people's dreams, psychodrama enables people to dream again. The best way to understand the power of psychodrama is to experience it and these evenings are designed to give participants an opportunity to experience psychodrama in a safe and gentle environment.
This evening will introduce you to psychodrama – a technique for exploring and resolving dramas in our lives. Bring a friend for an evening of learning and fun.