Emotional Benefits Of Practicing Theater
Among the emotional advantages of practicing theater is learning to detect feelings through the lives of your characters to be able to apply them later in your day-to-day life
In this article, we want to propose theater as a way to achieve the emotional well-being that we seek but cannot find. Life has changed a lot in recent years. Professional and personal demands have multiplied. These demands are often at odds with expectations, both our own and those of others.
All of this has resulted in an increase in our vital rhythm. As we begin to feel some discomfort, we do not even know its cause. We’re just sure we’re not feeling well. In these cases, therapists often recommend that we enroll in activities that we enjoy. Something that frees us and allows us to reconnect with our interior.
Know the emotional advantages of practicing theater
Helps you understand your feelings
We said that one of the most pressing problems we have today is not negative feelings, but ignorance of where they come from. One of the emotional benefits of practicing theater is that it opens doors in this regard.
Sometimes we need to step back to see what we have inside in perspective. Thus, by playing a role and putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes, we discover things about ourselves that we didn’t know were there.
In addition, the instructor or director tells us what the characters feel and why, a question that can be a way to get to that which is so difficult for us to understand.
Improve empathy
In the same way that it allows us to connect with our interior, we also reflect on what happens to others. We take the time for it. Something that outside of the classroom we may not have.
On the one hand, our character may be similar to that person we love, but with whom we have trouble getting along in recent times. On the other hand, it is possible that your scene partners remember him or her.
Regardless of what the case is, you will find yourself thinking about what moves him and why he acts that way. And this is how we come face to face with one of the emotional contributions of practicing theater: understanding those around us.
Helps us communicate
Has it ever happened to you that you know what you want to say but not how? In the theater we have a solution for it. Keep in mind that all that learning we do is accompanied by words and gestures.
Communication is also a matter of habits and skills. We have been taught something and we repeat it, but what if it is not enough? How do we expand our skills in this field?
The most important plays are those that collect the main emotional ones and express them best. Thus, by incorporating these expressions, ways of moving, of squinting … we also expand our communicative register.
In this way, one day we find ourselves saying something in a way that we could never have imagined. And we rejoice.
We learn that we are alone
One of the consequences of speed that we mentioned at the beginning is isolation. In addition to the obvious need for company, this loneliness leads us to think that there is no one who has the same problem. Or that few understand us.
The theater teaches us that many people have had the same experience. There are countless occasions when someone has found themselves at the same crossroads we are at. Consequently, we stop thinking of ourselves as strange beings, but as someone else who faces the challenge of living.
In this sense, one of the emotional benefits of practicing theater is that this question arises from the character’s conflict. That is, it is not a friend who tells you “nothing happens, it is very normal”, no. It arises with the feelings of bewilderment of the sufferer and with the relief when he finds the solution. This makes us feel very accompanied.
The theater, therefore, favors communication inward and outward. In addition, it helps us to realize that we are not the only ones who have that feeling and that there are different solutions for what ails us.
All this with the support of colleagues and teachers.
