Workshop of Expression

In the afternoon of the second day, with a little remaining nervous atmosphere among participants, a workshop of Expression started.

In this workshop, participants did a lot of　activities which required them not to be conscious with their movement, but to express with their body just as they felt. Through those activities, they could practice how to express their feelings, and it was indeed very useful in the last workshop of this program, performance.

Further more, because most of the activities were group activities (with two or more people), they had opportunities to have deep interaction with each other and it brought them an understanding of how different the way they feel and the way they express it are.

First, they played catch with “invisible ball”. In this activity, pitchers had to make some imitation sounds depends on how their “invisible ball” was, and catchers had to change the form they received it, hearing the imitation sound. It was interesting that even in this simple activity, we could find cultural difference as foreigners seemed not to be used to imitation sounds, while Japanese created various imitation sounds easily.

In another activity, participants walked around in the room with closing eyes, saying nothing, and they had to stop when they sensed someone stopping. Since they couldn’t use their sights and voices to know what is happening, they had to concentrate on very obscure sounds they could hear or to sense the stop of others’ walking through atmosphere. It was actually very enjoyable as well as interesting experience.

Finally, they had an activity for expression. In this activity, one of the group members explained what he or she had been moved recently, and then other members tried to express it with talks and body expressions. Here, everyone had to tell his or her feeling to others correctly, and on the other hand, they also had to accept the others’ feeling just as it was. Both those two exercises; to express what one felt and to accept others’ expression of his feeling, did help to make the atmosphere of the program that everyone is accepting each other.