Sweden
Embodied Imagination® Sweden.
Embodied Imagination® in Sweden has, from its very beginning, in the Spring of 2010, focused on using the EI-method for artists and artistic work of all kinds.
It all started with a so-called Research and development project at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. Three actors and a director worked on the Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse´s play Warm using the EI-method. Robert Bosnak and Janet Sonenberg came to Sweden to work with the actors and the director. The whole process was documented on film by Ingrid Blidberg, one of the founders of Embodied Imagination® Sweden.
These films can be seen on YouTube as “Theatre – Janet Sonenberg & Robert Bosnak´s Dreamwork for Actors”
Part 1, Incubation, and Part 2, Dreamwork.
(Ingrid Blidberg has made other films about the EI-method that can be found on YouTube:
Robert Bosnak´s Dance of the Imagination,
Four parts: Dreams, Identifying, Slow Down and Healing.)
Since this start, in which the EI-method was presented to artists in Sweden, several week-long courses have been conducted. Some were supported by the University of Gothenburg. Robert Bosnak taught several of those courses. Over the years, about eighty artists have, been given the chance to deepen their artistic work through the use of Embodied Imagination®.
Two master thesis have been written about EI and artistic work in the theatre. One was written by Ingrid Blidberg and the other by Anna Söderling. Both were written in Swedish.
At least one theatre performance was fully created and developed using the EI-method. In 2017 the musician, singer and actor Ida Lod created a one-woman-play about Ophelia in Shakespeare´s play Hamlet. The story was about Ophelia coming back from drowning herself – Ofelia Reversed. Ida Lod worked with Pelle Nordin, the other founder of Embodied Imagination® Sweden, in this work. Ida writes: “The script came to life bit by bit. It became texts, poems and songs. It was like Ophelia and I met there in the dreams, as if we were holding each other´s hands. Sometimes she was leading me, and sometimes I was leading her.”
Ingrid Blidberg has worked with the EI-method together with film director, Sylvelin Makestad, creating a screen play for a film. The cinematographer and the actors have also had a chance to more fully understand the space, light, camera angles, and characters by using this method.
Pelle Nordin has used the EI-method with acting students at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg, were he was teaching up to December 2017. He also introduced the method to acting students at the Norwegian Theatre Academy in Fredrikstad, Norway.
Both Ingrid Blidberg and Pelle Nordin are now working together with different artists, both individually and in groups, using the EI-method.
After having been treated for breast cancer, Ingrid Blidberg, based on her own experiences, is helping others in the same situation using EI – “to trigger the body´s own ability to heal.”
Presently, Pelle Nordin along with Narandja Milanovich Eagleson in California, is leading an 18- month training program – “Embodied Imagination® – Getting the Courage to Change”. The training is held over the internet and has participants from both the USA and Sweden. Ingrid Blidberg is involved in that training as a Guest Instructor.