The trap of what worked: crisis as a law of development in Therapeutic Theatre "TT"

Abstract

Accounts of how a theatre methodology develops are usually written as lists of improvements. This article proposes a different description, drawn from a single continuous body of practice: development proceeds by crises, and each crisis is produced by the success of the solution preceding it. The instrument that resolved the previous difficulty becomes the next obstacle — not because it failed, but because it worked. The argument borrows its structure, declared as a literary model only, from the Seldon crisis in Asimov's Foundation, where every crisis is double: an internal position made untenable by an external pressure. Three objects are examined against it: the four stages through which a closing device developed, the transitional forms between the three types of the methodology, and one performance in which both halves of a crisis are visible at once.