Can The Spider’s work Playshop methods become a recipe for life change?
The methods of the Spider’s work Playshop, provide a link between the growth of a fictional hero, like the one in Vogler’s scripts, and real people undergoing change. The workshop offers a method of externalising and re-evaluating belief systems by creating a ‘Special World’ for the individual where change occurs. The Special World is the world of the fictional drama created by the participants in their story. The hero’s journey from his Ordinary World to the Special World where he undergoes an Ordeal, learns a new wisdom and returns with this Elixir to his world, is paralleled by the participant in the Spider’s Work process who leaves her Ordinary World to enter the Special World of the drama, learns something and returns to her world with new insight. Particular emphasis is placed on the three thresholds the hero must cross:
· from his world to the Special world of the workshop
· from the journey outside to the journey to the inmost cave (the participant comes face to face with her own belief systems)
· back to her world where the insight is tested (after rehearsal for revolution the participant must model the change in real life situations).
The stories people tell and the roles they choose externalise their systems of belief. A participant using the Hero’s Journey to structure a story will, therefore fill it with her own ideologies, indeed her own value objects. In this way her story can help her to concretise those abstract values and beliefs that exist in her unconscious. At the same time she will be able to use the Hero’s Journey as an analytical tool to understand, not just what her own values are, but also how they work, because she will see how her hero’s values work. This speaks of a journey within a journey as suggested by Turner’s placement of stage drama within the context of social drama. It also points to a similar double movement for the kind of process that is offered by the spider’s work Playshops.
The Double Journey
1. The ordinary world of the participant
2. The participant enters the special world of drama and creates a character with his own Ordinary World
3. The character enters a Special World of his own and starts the journey to the Inmost Cave
4. The Ordeal: Through identification the participant and the character (hero) both face their desires and beliefs
5. The character Returns to his Ordinary World with the Elixer and applies his new insight
6. The participant also returns to her world, applying her own elixer
