Finding New Roles Through a Rainbow of Desire

Co-Authors: Diana Martinez and Daisy Martinez-DiCarlo

On May 31st, 2024, participants in Daisy’s workshop for the 27th Annual Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed walked into an auditorium at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida to find rows of spirit animal cards spread across the floor of the stage. There was a lion, a butterfly, a wolf, a stag and other animals that inspired feelings of power and calm. They were instructed to choose an image of their highest potential. “Everyone knows what their highest potential looks like,” said Daisy. “No one said ‘I can’t reach my potential so I don’t know what to pick.’ Everyone can access our highest potential unless we are anxious and something blocks us.”

Daisy was setting her participants up to experience The Rainbow of Desire, the   therapeutic branch of Boals’s work. Boal was a Brazilian theatre practitioner who was reportedly wounded by an experience in psychodrama and created his own model called Theatre of the Oppressed.  The Rainbow of Desire is Boal’s therapeutic branch of Theatre of the Oppressed.  “It’s about treating the internalized oppression to reach our potential,” says Daisy. She explains that one of his techniques asks us to address “The Cop in the Head.”  According to Daisy, “ The officer tells us what we can and cannot do. We are hard and punitive on ourselves. We tell ourselves we don’t deserve a good life.”

Laying the Groundwork: Community Resiliency

To apply principles of psychodrama and sociodrama, Daisy had participants choose scarves to represent first their personal and then community resiliency. The group chose to shape their scarves into a heart. A green scarf was added to represent the Earth. 

Moreno calls this concretization and through concretization, we can get more into our bodies. “Our bodies carry memories and feelings even when our minds don’t remember them and we have to be in our bodies in order to heal. As opposed to talking about a feeling, you create it,” said Daisy.

Catharsis

One participant knocked a chair and dented the heart of scarves. “Let’s get real, people,” he said. “This chair is Palestine.” In this way, he came to embody the collective role of hopelessness and powerlessness. Daisy asked what else was needed and at that point, someone added red and orange scarves to represent the bloodshed of the war in Gaza. Someone else sanctified the space with a white scarf before adding pastel pink and purple scarves to represent children. She waved the scarves representing the children back and forth.

“If anyone had told me I was directing a psychodrama on Gaza, I would have said no because people are going to be traumatized,” said Daisy. But she knew she had laid the groundwork by inviting participants to create safety sculpts early on in the process and she knew she could begin to use the work of collective roles to bring about the kind of transformation needed. She asked participants to include themselves in the world they had created now and speak from that collective role. “According to Moreno, collective roles are roles we share with others”, said Daisy.  The man representing hopelessness sobbed, “I can’t help them.” Another woman said “I’m in here but I’m reaching out.” Another woman said “I represent the hope that is present here.”

At one point, the woman representing hope took an umbrella with rainbow colors on it and opened it while standing on a chair. Someone saw it and said “I can be in this world, even with a broken heart.” Daisy addressed the man representing hopelessness. “Look up,” she said. He looked up and saw the rainbow and decided to change roles with the woman who was reaching out.

Transformation through Collective or “Shared” Roles

According to Daisy, “Role theory says we can reinvent ourselves at any time of our lives. No matter whether it’s a pandemic or nuclear war.” Moreno defined the role as the tangible parts that the self takes. Our self emerges from these different roles. The healthiest person has the widest repertoire of roles. In a sociodrama, we can create collective or community roles. We can reverse roles with someone stuck in hopelessness, for instance. Daisy asked the group “What role reversals are needed here? Can you become the transformation that’s needed here.” That’s when things started shifting.

“What is our rainbow of desire?”  Daisy asked. This was the moment of transformation. Powerlessness was able to get up off the floor. The woman holding the children was able to give the children the voice. “I am the voice of the children who are voiceless,” she said. People reached what Moreno would call their inner genius by becoming unstuck and creating new roles. “As Nina Garcia wrote in her book, ‘Sociodrama: Who’s in Your Shoes?’, folks were able to explore, create and rehearse new roles” according to Daisy.  The man who embodied powerlessness got into an empowered role with someone who was reaching out. In psychodrama roles are private. Participants are role-taking, role-playing, and role-creating. “We all have the answers in us,” according to Daisy.  “In sociodrama, roles are shared and are less revelatory.” said Daisy.  Daisy noticed that the collective roles created the distance and safety that participants needed to become vulnerable and to express their feelings about the traumatic global issue of war.

The work done in psychodrama and sociodrama stays with you. In this case, the collective grief became a catalyst for the role of hope. “The group has decision-making power and they collaborate on what roles they are going to create,” Daisy explained. The beauty is that “I’m going to remember this role in my body,” says Daisy. This is how we can reach our full potential.

Collective Sharing

     During the sharing, participants were invited to de-role and to share new solutions and new collective roles they noticed in the sociodrama that they will take back with them into their communities and networks.  Their ability to be vulnerable with each other in a safe container about the issue of war was a major take away.