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Paul Rebillot


Paul Rebillot (May 19, 1931 – February 11, 2010) was a member of the human potential movement. He is the author of The Call to Adventure: Bringing the Hero’s Journey to Daily Life.

Paul Rebillot was born on May 19, 1931 in Detroit, Michigan. His initial academic training was in philosophy and education at the University of Detroit and was followed by a Masters in Communication Arts, specialising in drama, from the University of Michigan. Before and after his university years he worked with several theatre companies as a writer, producer and actor.

Rebillot's military service took him, for a year, to Japan where he produced and directed radio programs for the U.S. Army's Far East Radio Network. His exposure to the Japanese culture and particularly to Noh, the stylised and ritualised form of Japanese drama, was subsequently to become an important influence on his use of ritual and gesture in his work.

Returning to the United States, Rebillot developed an experimental theater department at San Francisco State College and, in the same period, worked with Mumako, a Japanese mime, developing his understanding of ritual gesture, meditation postures which shape the energies to the attitude expressed by the gesture, which became a key element in his work. In 1968, after a year of teaching at Stanford University’s theater department, he founded in San Francisco The Gestalt Fool Theater Family, a commune and a radical performance group, and commenced experimental work combining theatre, ritual and therapy.

The theater work, as well as a severe existential crisis, led him in 1971 to the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. There, he worked with Stan Grof and John Lilly, trained in Gestalt Practice with Esalen's co-founder Dick Price and studied group process with Will Schutz. Rebillot met Joseph Campbell, an expert in comparative mythology who believed monomyths, motifs of adventure and transformation to be found in all heroic tales, could be found in all cultures. These encounters with Price, Schutz and Campbell laid the foundations of Rebillot's subsequent work in the human potential movement.


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