Pre and Post-Conference Workshops 2025
Pre-Conference workshops
- Hamish Brown and Cinnamon Boreham: What Truly Matters
- Jenny Hutt and Bev Hosking: Consolidating Intercultural Work
Post-Conference workshops
Pre-Conference Workshop 2025
Hamish Brown and Cinnamon Boreham
What Truly Matters
14-15 January 2025
Manaakitanga is the brightest thread woven through the fabric of relationships, binding people together in mutual respect, generosity, and support. The practice of Manaakitanga builds mana in the other and the self; this, in turn, enhances the well-being of our community.
Moreno’s vision is a call to action, a belief that our survival as a species hinges on our collective ability to establish systems that prioritise our humanity. For him, what truly matters is social cohesion, summed up in the book title, Who Shall Survive? In Aotearoa, New Zealand, we face the challenge of existing within a cultural context that invites us to acknowledge our differences while recognising what binds us together. Centrally, this challenge is one of role reversal.
This pre-conference workshop begins with the premise that group psychotherapy calls us to the edge of the dual experiences of belonging as a collective and expressing our unique experience as individuals. In the spirit of manaakitanga, we will use Moreno’s method to examine the forces that lead to increasing social cohesion and those that lead to a decrease.
Together, we will discover what truly matters, producing the psychodramas we anticipate best serve our development as a group. Within whānau (family) and whanaunga (extended whānau), sits Au (the individual).
Pre-Conference Workshop 2025
Jenny Hutt and Bev Hosking
Consolidating Intercultural Work
14-15 January 2025
As we work with individuals, groups and organisations of diverse cultures, the way we think about the context and purpose of our efforts needs attention and ongoing refreshment.
Being open, relational and willing to learn is a good foundation for intercultural functioning. There are many pertinent perspectives which help consolidate the work, including those gained through lived experiences and cultural contact, cultural self-awareness, historical awareness, and growing an awareness of the unconscious ‘moves’ and blind spots of dominant groups.
This workshop is for people actively engaged in intercultural relations in their work who are wanting to refresh perspectives, tackle role conflicts, build their capacities and further consolidate or refine their orientation to this work.
A range of approaches will be used including sociometric activities, sociodrama, role training and discussion of practice. Reference will be made to contemporary literature.
A shorter presentation and panel discussion will be offered within the conference itself for a wider range of participants.
Post-Conference Workshop 2025
Chris Hosking
Creating moments of optimism for everyday life: a focus on Role Training
20-21 January 2025
Role training is an effort to help us perform adequately in future situations. It is a method of learning that aims to bring about a rise in the spontaneity level of an individual and combine this with practice of a new expression.
Making an apparently minor change in an area of our functioning which we recognize as a role or part role, can result in a ripple effect in a larger sphere or system. Role training focuses on the development of one aspect of a role, but has in its larger view the transformation of the groups and culture in which we live.
In this workshop we will review in detail the steps in the role training method, practice the conduct of a session and experience being a protagonist. The learning will be experiential and participants can expect to be actively involved in all aspects of this group method.
Post-Conference Workshop 2025
Rollo Browne and Bona Anna
The Drama of the Unfinished Self
20-21 January 2025
Psychodrama is essentially a theatre for self-enactment. No matter the drama, we continually enact our ‘self’. The evolution of the self is something Moreno did not really define beyond the stages of the double, the mirror and role reversal, so we must work it out for ourselves. But it is clear in his Invitation to an Encounter (1914), that he considered our creation as a self to be unfinished: “More important than the evolution of creation is the evolution of the creator”. The self then can be said to be our greatest and ongoing creation. This requires that we learn to live in the here and now and maintain receptiveness and spontaneity in the face of the unknown.
One of the most potent tests of our ability to live freely in the unknown is as a psychodrama director, often not knowing what will emerge or how to respond during an enactment. In this regard, we must grapple with two major life forces that Max Clayton identified as being in continual conflict: the drive to be safe and the drive to grow. This training workshop is about where you are in the drama of the unfinished self, what supports you, what holds you back and what is needed to live in the unknown as a psychodrama director or group member.