Having a strong emotional container is important if you want to increase your capacity to hold your big emotions and feelings and to transform the limiting overwhelming energy of trauma into a contained awakening of your gifts and artistic potential.

This awakening enables you to authentically play a diverse range of characters or sing a range of emotional content. To attain this awakening you need to unlock and release but not relive the trauma and tension that is holding patterns of dysregulation in your body and inhibiting your capacity, resilience, imagination and creativity,  physically, emotionally and vocally.

As we work releasing and metabolizing the energy of trauma you will gently and easily make space for the big emotions you need in your work.  When working and releasing the tensions in your body with somatic touch work, you will feel emotions as physical sensations, textures and colours, in your body and then experience them in a contained and non-threatening way,  not as a catharsis, but as waves moving through the body.

When allowed to integrate and matabolize excess energy gently, we make more and more space for the rapture of life, for the bigger emotions, for joy and sorrow, love and anger, passion and ecstasy and the gentle pleasure in the simple things. For "it is only when there is softness in the instrument, the body, the voice that energy can pass through it, heal and change how we perform, behave and ultimately live" (Micheal Chekhov).

Not only does this completed process, give you the capacity to get your mind, or what Michael Chekhov called "the little intellect", out of the way to allow your character or the song you are singing to become fully formed and to breath their own breath, or release the song you are working on. It also frees you the performer to live and breath within it and in the world: to experience the joys and sorrows in your own life without becoming overwhelmed, stuck or frozen.

How is this different to other practices that offer SE and OI for the performer?

What makes what I do different to other practitioners in Australia who offer somatic experiencing to artists to heal their lives and their craft, is twofold. First I am a director, theatre teacher and performer with over twenty years training and teaching somatic theatre practice.  I know your world and what it is to take on a role, the anxiety of auditioning, the challenges of working with less than optimal Directors, the challenges of finding nuance in character, the ongoing issues of type casting.  

My work as a performer and facilitator both in theatre and therapy has been set free by fusing embodied acting and voice practice with SE, Organic Intelligence and somatic (touch) practice . This has been an eight year exploration and I can now share with you this transformational process: the  "how" of safely fusing theatre and somatic therapy to set both you, your characters and songs free.

The second advantage is that you can work with me on your pieces from three perspectives.  You can work solely from the song, piece or role you are working on at the moment.  To do this you will work with a variety of somatic acting and voice practice, safely going deeper than before because I do not just offer a way through to clearer expression of emotion inside the words but in working to organize your stress responses I will assist you to be free of the turbulence they cause. You will also work with the parts of yourself that connect with the character and make space for emotions it has never been safe to express. You will do this without going into overwhelm or having days of dysregulation and distress afterwards. You will become a clearer stronger vessel through which your characters can emerge.

Alternately you may want to explore the blocks you have in a more traditional SE/OI approach to healing. In doing this you will build a stronger and deeper container, release stress and tension from your instrument and organically learn to hold and access the emotions you need to access, to deliver grounded, authentic performances and/or create unique projects.

Or you may chose to engage with a mix of both.


Lets do this together and breath new life into you and your work...
                                

What I can do is offer myself, wholehearted and present, to walk with you through the fear and the mess.  That’s all any of us can do. That’s what I am here for.”
– Shauna Niequist