Central Workshop: Sociodrama and Social Repair in Communities

by Frances Burton-Brown

Ten of us gathered for this event, run by Diz Synnot, at The Training Space in Wellington on Monday 10 August. Diz opened by connecting social repair in communities with social atom repair in individuals. She told us a story about her work in Aboriginal communities where there are different forces operating in the generations, different connections with the world, and different world views. In this case, music was the focus of misunderstanding, with the older generation not understanding why the young people enjoyed harsh and ugly American music.

Social repair can occur as a neighbour, and Diz talked about the conflict over dogs in her community, where she has no mandate to work with anyone. How do we make our own mandate? By working sociometrically with Moreno’s ideas. Diz wanted us to finish by discussing what she did with a context we share ‘in here’. The work occurs in the warmup and discussion – the drama isn’t the whole show!

Diz asked us to work sociometrically to develop our relationship further to get into pairs, and then into two groups, one of four, one of five, working sociometrically, to consider what group in our life at the moment would benefit from some form of social systems repair. When considering how to form a group, to think perhaps about someone we didn’t know so well, or someone who might be a bit different for us.

This occurred easily, and in our groups we talked about something in our life that would benefit from social systems repair.

Diz asked the group to share, with “almost a title, a sentence, but not a paragraph, and certainly not a chapter.” A minutes or two later there were nine titles on the board, all very succinct and very intriguing. Examples: Fight, Lose and Leave; Aladdin’s Grandmother; New Lamps for Old; Cracks in Community House.

In response to who would be willing to be a protagonist in a group centred sociodrama, Rosemary spoke about a situation she had warmed up to instantly at the start of the session.

The enactment set up a complex system of groups sharing a community house and the relationship with the funding body. Auxiliaries warmed up to roles, and Diz worked with Rosemary to draw out interactions between the groups. Then we were asked, “Choose your opposite. Once in the role, we were asked to express that role, and then to choose who we depended on. The group linked up to show the dependencies. From those roles we began to say what we thought…..“The world works best when…. What I value is….”

We did this over and over, warming up more and more to our own views about the world in this situation as we went along, and it got deeper, until at the end we were passionately expressing what we believed not only in role, but in our lives.

We then sat and talked in small groups, and when we came together Diz asked if anyone had a burning desire to speak to the whole group. She acknowledged that there was a lot in the air, and discussed bringing out the differences in the drama with the expression of values, and taking the system out further….or in further by identifying who’s dependent on whom. Identifying dependency and interdependency.

Diz said that to increase the warmup it would be important to interview in role, to reduce the tendency to stereotype, but in this group there was excellent auxiliary work, so her role interviewing was minimal. We ended with a group sharing session, encompassing individual learnings and experiences.

Ally thanked Diz for “Your warmth and your gentleness, and your strength and your Australianness”.

I found it a delightfully approachable taste of sociodrama, given far distant memories of chaotic events also called sociodrama in my training.