There is a moment, just before a scene begins, when I have to keep quiet.
The two of them are standing there, waiting. I have just given them the conflict: who you are to each other, what each of you wants, why this conversation cannot wait until tomorrow. That is more than enough to get started.
And that is when I find myself adding one more thing. A small instruction, apparently technical, something like and in the end, you don't give in. It sounds like precision, but it isn't. I have already seen the whole scene in my head, and I am trying to make it turn out the way I saw it.
This still happens to me after quite a few years of doing this. I don't think it is going to go away.
What I give them and what I keep to myself
A good prompt is short. It gives a conflict, two positions and a sense of urgency, and then steps aside.
What it does not give is a direction. It does not say how things have to end, what anyone should discover, or at what point they ought to get emotional. That is not information I have: it is a film I have made up while watching them from the outside over the past few weeks.
Because that is what happens when you have been with a group for months. You start drawing a map of each person. This one always gives in. That one cannot ask for anything. Another laughs just when something gets through to them. And the map is useful; that is why you observe. The problem comes when my map turns into a script.
I see someone who always gives in, and I am already imagining the scene in which they finally stand their ground. I have worked out the voice they are going to find, the moment they find it, how good it is going to be for them. And at that point I am no longer facilitating: I am waiting for someone to perform something I have written.
The participant has not even started, and I already have the conclusion ready.
My expectations come into the room too
This does not stay inside my head, and that is where it gets complicated.
It comes through in the tone I use to give the prompt, in where I stand, in what I ask afterwards and what I don't ask. Above all, it comes through in a detail that is hard to notice from the inside: when I stop the scene. If the work is going where I expected, I let it run. If it goes somewhere else, something in me grows restless and I feel the urge to intervene. And that urge almost never comes from the person in front of me.
The participants pick up on it, even if they do not know what they are picking up on. It is very easy to read what a facilitator would like to happen. And as soon as someone reads it, they start trying to please you, which is the exact opposite of the work.
A boat leaving in half an hour
There is a scene I handled badly that I remember in detail, because it is the one that taught me all this.
A student chose to play a cloistered nun. Her character had fallen in love with a man from the next village, and the scene was about telling the Mother Superior: she was leaving the convent, she was going away, there was a boat leaving the harbour in half an hour and he was waiting for her there.
We had been meeting as a group for months. She had often spoken about her husband, about a conflict that never ended, about his not doing his share with the children. So the moment the scene began, I already knew what was happening: the Mother Superior was her husband, and that boat was the way out.
And I started facilitating in that direction. I did not tell her what to do, but I pushed. I asked her to hold her ground, to repeat the sentence, to really feel what it was like to say it. I helped her gather the strength to leave, which was the ending I had written while watching her.
She said it. She took a breath, stood her ground and said the whole thing.
What emerged then was not strength. It was an immense pain, because she was not ready to leave him. And the scene helped her touch exactly that, even though I was looking elsewhere. What remained to be done that afternoon was not to celebrate a decision: it was to stay with her through a grief I had brought forward before she was ready.
Saying out loud that we are taking a chance
Part of this work runs on intuition, and there is no way for me to disguise that.
Sometimes I see something — a repeated gesture, a breath that catches at the same point every time — and suggest an exploration based on that and nothing else. I have no proof. I have a hunch and quite a few years of watching bodies.
That is why I say it at the start of every workshop, before anyone has done anything: at some point we are going to take a chance on intuition. It may take us somewhere interesting. Nothing may happen, in which case nothing has happened and we carry on. Both are fine.
Saying it beforehand frees me from having to get it right. If the hunch leads nowhere, there is nothing to defend and no face to save: we knew that was a possibility.
What I cannot conclude
And then there is the temptation afterwards, which to me is the more dangerous of the two.
The scene ends. Something powerful has happened, the group is silent, and a perfectly neat interpretation of what I have just seen has formed in my mind. I have the sentence ready. It sounds good, it fits what I know about that person, it would explain a lot.
I almost always keep it to myself.
Because someone playing a tyrant for ten minutes does not give me the right to tell them that deep down they are a tyrant. And what emerged there did not come solely from their history: the prompt I gave, the partner they worked with, the group watching, the time of day, whatever they were carrying that morning all played a part. It took shape between us. Attributing all of it to that person is a poor reading, and a convenient one too.
The person will have to find what they recognise there as their own, and they may recognise nothing, or disagree, or need three weeks. All of that is valid. What is not valid is for me to feel I have to convince them of my interpretation. If I find myself doing that, I am the one who needs to look again.
The closing round
When we return to the circle, I ask what they are taking away and what they found difficult. And sometimes the last version of the same problem appears there, the most discreet one.
Because I would like someone to say something that brings the session to a satisfying close. A sentence that connects the scene with their life, that gives meaning to the afternoon, that leaves us all feeling we have got somewhere. And you can tell when a facilitator is waiting for that: people start searching for the sentence.
Often, all someone can say is that they feel stirred up and do not know why. That is a complete answer. What is needed then is to ask nothing more of them and resist the urge to tie everything up neatly.
The useful question is the one that keeps working after they have gone home: what happened to me while I was there? And later, if it comes, another: if I could ask for help in an invented scene, what happens when I try it with someone in my life?
That dialogue is no longer mine to write.
In October
The second cohort of the Theatre Gestalt training starts in Murcia in October. We train facilitators, and this is one of the things you have to learn: to distinguish between intervening because the person needs it and intervening because you are the one who needs something.
You do not learn it by reading about it. You learn it when someone stops you and asks why you cut the scene at that exact moment, and you have to give an honest answer.
Interested in the Theatre Gestalt training? The second cohort starts in October 2026 in Murcia. I announce each new article on Instagram. If you would like to write to me, you can use the contact section.