How do our values, ideals and attitudes serve us in today's world?
Each time we meet, in fact, in every single interaction that we have with another person, there is a value system involved. We each have a set of personal principles and standards by which we act in the world in a particular way.
Have we thrown the baby out with the bath water with the winds of change? Or have we held on fast to attitudes or values that no longer serve us? Have our values become obstacles or even jailers to our spontaneity, creativity and happiness?
Where do we get these axioms? Are they personal, absorbed from our family, a social norm, a fashion or cultural imperative from a sub-group or a cultural absolute?
Preserving our forests may well be an axiom that could become the theme of an axiodrama. What is strength and why do we value it? If we do!
In the field of education the tide is fast coming in on new ways of learning. Should children use calculators in the classroom?
Gay marriage - For or Against. This current topic has been made even more topical through Barack Obama's recent stance on gay marriage.
Axiodrama was the first expression of psychodrama. Created by Dr Jacob Levy Moreno in 1914 axiodrama explores the values and that we live by and our basic assumptions about the world and our expectations. There are individual values, social values and cultural values. Some would say there are also spiritual values and at times experience a crisis in faith. Sometimes our values even threaten our lives. What price conception if you are not going to survive the birth?
Axiodrama also explores and deals with religious, ethical and cultural values. It was the first 'content' to be used in the psychodrama method beginning around 1918, second came sociodrama in 1921 and then psychodrama and particularly its application to mental disorders developed in the united states in the mid-twenties of the 20th century.
The eternal verities - are they still eternal? - of truth, justice, beauty, grace, piety, perfection, eternity and peace can all be explored as the subject of the axiodrama. What about the pursuit of happiness, a subject that has intrigued philosophers over the centuries.
"What constitutes happiness?" might be a subject for an axiodrama.
The Moreno Psychodrama Society invites you and your friends, colleagues and family to a night of axiodramatic splendour. The evening will also suit therapists, educators, those in the business and corporate worlds, lawyers, ethicists and those in the human services. At this month's Theatre of Spontaneity Sue Daniel will take us along the path of exploration into the world of values, ideals, qualities, expectations and attitudes, their birth, their relevance or their demise and the effect of this on ourselves and the world.
Place: The Psychodrama Institute of Melbourne, 155 Langridge St, Collingwood.
Time: 6 p.m - cup of tea and registration for a 6.30 p.m start until 8.30 p.m.
Fee: $20.00 ($15.00 for members of MPS)
RSVP to Gavin O'Loughlin: 0403 597 685
Supper is served with freshly brewed coffee and a selection of teas.
