How to tell stories that heal. A one-day seminar

This seminar explores how a story can reach the imaginative mind and work on many levels, and for different purposes, and covers the value of understanding and why we evolved to dream.

A lot of psychotherapy involves storytelling. On this popular training day, master storyteller Pat Williams explores stories that have a powerful, beneficial effect on the mind/body system and teaches you the secrets of how to tell such therapeutic tales. You cannot know what goes on in another person’s mind but, if you perceive the ‘pattern’ of a story and understand that it could be useful to them at this specific point in their life, that is reason enough to tell it. Their unconsciousness, creative imagination will seek and find the ‘meaning’ relevant to their situation. No explanation, no direct statement of a story’s meaning can substitute for the way it acts on the hearer’s mind. Stories help people to bypass rigid views about life, enhancing their flexibility of thought. By suspending ordinary constraints, stories help people reclaim optimism and fuel their imagination with the energy necessary to attain goals. In the physically ill, they can stimulate the immune system and speed recovery.

Speaker(s): Pat Williams

22 March 2012 at 9:30 am
Friends Meeting House
173 Euston Road
London
NW1 2BJ

www.humangivenscollege.com

Finborough Celebrates British Music Theatre

Gilbert and Sullivan’s Grand Duke – only six performances

The Finborough Theatre’s ‘Celebrating British Music Theatre’ series continues with the first fully staged professional UK production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s final operetta, The Grand Duke, since the original 1896 production. It opens at the Finborough Theatre for a limited run of six Sundays and Mondays from Sunday, 1 April 2012.

In the Grand Duchy of Pfennig Halbpfennig, the theatrical troupe of Ernest Dummkopf is plotting a conspiracy to overthrow the tyrannical Grand Duke Rudolph. Ludwig, the troupe’s leading comedian, fights a number of “statutory duels” and finds himself taking the place and the title of the Grand Duke, but when legions of women arrive to claim Ludwig in marriage to become his Grand Duchess, including an indignant leading lady, an enormously wealthy old battleaxe, and even the Princess of Monte Carlo, how will matters resolve themselves?

With the aid of an eclectic array of travelling players and aristocrats, four weddings and enough sausage rolls to last several lifetimes, Gilbert and Sullivan’s final ‘Savoy Opera’ is full of Topsy Turvy paradoxes, legal conundrums and absurdities of etiquette. Far more than just a historical curiosity, The Grand Duke displays a much sharper satirical edge than any of Gilbert and Sullivan’s other works.