This project is about expanding perception. Letting go of control. Letting in serendipity. But it is also about healing.
When you ask people about love they tell you about heartbreak. We all know the “I’m not good enough feeling”, and we all know fear of loss. And yet we pretend we don’t. But in order to open ourselves for connection, we have to allow ourselves to be seen. In our most vulnerable, naked of emotional states. You can only do this if you do not fear and if you do not close down. It takes courage.
Courage in its original meaning is to say who you are with your whole heart. The courage to be imperfect, willing to let go of who you think you should be. Fully embrace vulnerability. What makes you vulnerable makes you beautiful.
This is what this project aims to do. To reveal the mechanisms of fearing, closing down, hiding and disconnecting, and unravel them. To go down to the feelings of unworthiness for love and belonging. Emotion is the target and the agent of change. As one of the characters says: “Let the healing begin.”
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The series of improvisations examines rather explicitly the intimate components of a love relationship. Four couples who have reached a crossroads over love issues. Each episode offers tender honesty about the fragility of love – towards the self, towards the other.
The world is full of couples. We move in couples. Interactions of couples are often characterized by cycles where, for example, one partner pursues while the other withdraws. Sometimes, very often indeed, we stay in couples because we see no way out or because we do not dare to make the step. As one of the characters says in one of the improvs: “Who between comfort and change, would choose change?”
We are afraid of the unknown, so we stay in the known, even when we are unhappy. We persuade ourselves we are happy enough. Or that where we are is better than somewhere else. Or that we have to stay – to avoid hurting someone, as a sacrifice to the kids, the other half, to our own security. But it is more than that: We all have had our hearts broken and wonder whether we will love more than being loved… and whether we will end up hurting. Change means the possibility for new hurting. Or does it?
In our story one of the characters finds the courage to change. Her action becomes a catalyst which influences the whole world around her. Family and friends, other couples, they all watch in awe, and they all react – and resist. Like a stone thrown into the water and creating waves and circles which become bigger and bigger, Alis leads the way into a new order of things.
Using the notion of transforming emotion with emotion, we challenge the way we think about love and the nature of reality – and about how the way we tell our stories, to ourselves and others, defines it.
But most of all, we question the nature of love as we perceive it – in order, perhaps, hopefully, to understand what love really is, or even better, to experience what love really is.
Let the healing begin.
42SecondsofHappiness 