Ekaterina Patyaeva (Russia)

Dramatic improvisation is a creative group role-playing game based on works of art or, as in the proposed workshop, based on a philosophical text. The main stages of dramatic improvisation are 1) joint reading of the text by roles, 2) its discussion, and 3) an improvisation game that develops a read story or embodies some alternative version of it. The participants of the proposed workshop, as in the "basic" version of dramatic improvisation, will read the text in roles, exchange their impressions, thoughts and feelings that arose in the process of reading and listening to the text and then improvise their versions of its continuation. In addition to the two roles that are present in the text of the conversation - the Philosopher (Pierre Hadot himself) and the Questioner (Jeannie Carlier), the roles of Student, Simpleton, Disputer, Elderly Mister (Elderly Lady) and, possibly, some more, and these characters will participate in group work not only at the stage of the improvisation game itself, but also at the stage of reading the text, where they can ask questions, express their opinions, argue, etc. The workshop has two goals: first, the study and demonstration of the possibilities of dramatic improvisation in working with philosophical texts; secondly, the correlation by the participants of the thesis "our happiness is only in the present" with their life experience, with testing the applicability of this thesis to their life and with the possible identification of various modalities of the "present" and the expansion of their experience.