by Mary Sala

Created on: March 05, 2010

Theatre Training and Spirituality

 “Like all true art, theatre should enhance the desire and strengthen the capacity – to live!”

Aristotle

How do we “enhance our desire and strengthen our capacity to live” in our everyday life? It’s not about enduring life day after day and years later reaching retirement. It is about living artfully, with passion, beauty and skill…every day, every hour and every moment. Although today theatre, film and television are mostly seen as sources of entertainment and escapism, I believe theatre and specifically theatre training have a much more vital role to play in society.

The art form of theatre with its many training modalities and the shift in perspective it facilitates is society’s life coach, wellness trainer and Spiritual teacher. The body-mind and voice awareness skills one acquires through theatre training are in harmony with those we seek to develop as part of greater spiritual awareness. These include mental discipline, acceptance, detachment, lasting body health and wellness, courage to move through fear, the use and mastery of the feeling energies of the voice and body and ultimately, spontaneous creative freedom. Plus, it’s fun! The sense of creative play that theatre training encourages is a necessary and often missing component in everyday living.

Theatre and actor training as an art form makes total use of the creative human instrument. The actor’s mind, voice and body are the medium, the instrument and the canvas on and out of which they create. They also attain mastery of the emotional instrument, developing the ability to instantly produce feeling responses in the body. He or she then coordinates all of these as a harmonized instrument of creative expression.

Great Spiritual Teachers from Buddha and Jesus to Ernest Holmes and Eckhart Tolle continue to encourage us to shift how we view the world around us and to remember we are creative beings with dominion over that which is material. This includes and in fact begins with our personal body-mind and vocal instruments. Present moment awareness and mastery of the human creative instrument in order to embody the feeling nature of what we wish to experience in our lives, is key to the Spiritual Co-Creative Process. Mohandas Gandhi stated it very clearly, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” Well, what if we took him at his word? What would happen if we all took on the physical

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