There's a moment, on the first day of every group, that repeats itself always the same and always different. I stick four strips of tape to the floor marking out a rectangle. It isn't much. A patch of room like any other, with its slightly worn boards and the mid-afternoon light coming in from the side. And yet, when I ask someone to step in there for the first time, something changes in their body before they even put a foot inside.
Because that rectangle stops being floor. It becomes a stage. And a stage, even when it's empty, is never entirely empty.
Before anyone steps in, I tell them what they're going to find. I tell them that space is not like the corridor they came down, or the waiting room, or their house. It's a space of fiction, where the rules of every day are suspended for a while. Where they can be who they don't dare to be outside. Where what they normally hide can be shown, and what they normally keep quiet can finally have a voice.
Then I ask them to cross.
What shows up when you cross
Almost nobody crosses the same way. There's the one who walks in with an air of confidence that lasts exactly until they're alone in the centre. Then the body that seemed so steady starts looking for where to stand, what to do with the hands, and the armour cracks. There's the one who hugs the edges, walking the margins like someone asking permission to exist, and when you invite them to the centre something trembles, because taking up space is a statement not everyone allows themselves. There's the one who walks in and immediately starts doing things, moving a lot, filling the silence with activity, because the emptiness is unbearable. And there's the one who walks in and freezes. The space that looked empty suddenly fills with gazes, with imagined judgements, and the breath gets short.
And then comes the moment of lifting the eyes. I ask them to look at the audience — which in this case is the rest of us, watching from outside. That's where the magic, or the terror, intensifies.
«Fear», says one. «I feel like they're going to judge me. Like I'm making a fool of myself. Like everyone can see what I don't want them to see.»
«Euphoria», says another. «I feel like I could be anything I want. Like there are no limits here. Like I'm free.»
«Shame», someone admits. «They're thinking who does she think she is.»
«Power», another recognises, almost surprised at himself. «I like being looked at. I feel big.»
«Loneliness», a voice whispers. «I'm up here and you're all down there, and there's an abyss between us.»
«Connection», says someone else. «When I look you in the eyes, I feel I'm not alone. That we're in this together.»
The gesture is identical in all of them. Step in, stay, hold the gaze of whoever is watching. What moves inside meanwhile looks nothing like it does from one person to the next. We could spend a whole week on this alone.
The first step is already the whole road
Over the years I've learned not to hurry that first day. There are facilitators who want to get as fast as possible to the «deep» work, to the scene that moves everyone, to the moment you tell people about afterwards. I've come to discover the opposite. In that apparently simple gesture of crossing the threshold, everything that will come later is already condensed.
What you feel the first time you plant yourself on stage and let people look at you isn't a formality before something else. It's already the work, in miniature. The one who hugged the edges will have to learn to take up their place, and not only inside the room. The one who filled the silence by moving will one day have to find out what happens if, for once, they stay still. And the paralysis that comes over someone when they're looked at rarely stays on stage. They carry it with them to plenty of other places. The stage invents none of this. It just puts it where it can be seen.
That's why I like this moment so much. Because it's honest. There's no technique yet to hide behind, no character to hold on to. It's just you, crossing a line of adhesive tape, and everything you are comes in with you.
Maybe you're about to cross it
If you've read this far, maybe you're not a facilitator looking for ideas for your group. Maybe you're someone who has been turning over the idea of training for a while, who has looked at the school's page more than once, who has felt the pull and the fear at the same time. That mix of pull and fear, by the way, is exactly what people describe when they cross the threshold for the first time. I stopped reading it long ago as a sign that you're not ready. In my experience it tends to be the doorway to something that matters.
In October the second cohort of the Theatre Gestalt training begins in Murcia. A new group is going to walk into that room, look at that rectangle of tape on the floor, and cross it for the first time. I don't know them yet. But there's something I can already picture. Each of them will arrive with their own way of approaching the edge — some head on, some sideways, some barely daring — and none of them will come out the same as they went in.
Maybe one of them is you.
Interested in the Theatre Gestalt training? The second cohort starts in October 2026 in Murcia. I announce each new article on Instagram. If you'd like to write to me, there's the contact section.