To bring a full-bodied experience, using the arts, heritage ecology and landscape, as an approach to interconnect, fuse disciplines, humble ourselves to explore an ethical method, to open to the possibility that we do not know better than other species. Working with arts, culture/heritage and ecology we can learn, develop the skills of valuing, prioritise, empathise and collaborate creatively in a shared space with other than human.
Angel or Warrior our ancestors we carry with us and are seen in the residues and traces of our environments
Moving with, learning about the ancient skills and patterns of transhumance, where female dairy folk left the lower pastures of their homes to travel side by side with cattle and sheep to graze, produce butter, their rituals and practises moved into and with the landscape and its heart was ecological.
We have found that during this process of moving from and reaching into…
To bring a full-bodied experience, using the arts, heritage ecology and landscape, as an approach to interconnect, fuse disciplines, humble ourselves to explore an ethical method, to open to the possibility that we do not know better than other species. Working with arts, culture/heritage and ecology we can learn, develop the skills of valuing, prioritise, empathise and collaborate creatively in a shared space with other than human.
Angel or Warrior our ancestors we carry with us and are seen in the residues and traces of our environments
Moving with, learning about the ancient skills and patterns of transhumance, where female dairy folk left the lower pastures of their homes to travel side by side with cattle and sheep to graze, produce butter, their rituals and practises moved into and with the landscape and its heart was ecological.
We have found that during this process of moving from and reaching into our ancestral body, mind and knowledge, it has encouraged us to extend our idea of connectors and conductors, it troubles our idea of linear time of cause and effect, it helps us to come back to our embodied wisdom, deep within our DNA and works with a shared materiality with traces and residues of Dartmoor’s historical landscapes. These productions and adaptions to discover evolutionary ecology by fusion with sociocultural practices, under a canopy of deep time, deep listening, deep knowing, sharpen our exploration and possibility in shared spaces full of potential.
Finding the narratives of the past resonating from and into our own materiality can encourage us to consider and revisit ancient ways of being, as tools to help us voice the unheard and build confidence in the present for our capacity to be heard, ability to be seen and resourcefulness in moving through this global and personal crisis epoch sustainably.
Creativity is one of culture/societies finest healers and gifts, it is also a guiding flame to lead us out of the pandemic into a new way of coexisting with ecology, by working alongside.
This required interconnectedness and weaving of species, human, cattle, plant, landscape, strata, wolf, bird, resourcefulness, creativity, orientation, navigation, kinaesthetic sense, following, herding, leading, yearning, churning, playing, moving instinctually to follow the topographies and ‘others terrain’ of the land. If we allow ‘other than human’ to lead us, we can work with the intangible, liminal borderland spaces, that are required for the global renaissance necessary.
Our course will help us to connect
Article copyright Sarah Boreham at movementchangeslife.com
[ Images by Sarah Boreham and Sharon Gedye (Image 4)]
Brian Massumi says ‘Activity rather than substance’ is more useful for this research which seeks to imbrue historical and virtual bodies . In this sense by exploring text, historical ruins and landscape, through embodied practice, ritual, reflexive materialities, dance, embodied knowledge and embodied imagination, a particular attention of affective registers and flows, movement analysis will constitutes intensity of fields.
This is a post foundational study and as such has germinated from a curiosity in cultural practice of transhumance on Dartmoor in prehistory , in which dairymaids left their dwellings on the lower hills to move and feed cattle onto the higher pastures for three months over the summer.
Imagining that women’s voices/bodies/materials need to be heard and experiences seen, I seek to embody and materialise lost voices from the spectral or rhizome like possibilities. Invoking alongside the landscape of Dartmoor, the materiality of these women, by using embodied working practices, movements , rituals from Beltane Dairying practices as exemplars of Intercorporial embodied materials. Dairying marked seasonal differentiation, and change, of shamanism and the interconnected relationships. Through transhumance (co)inhabitors in this neolithic and mesolithic landscape; to survive and thrive it has been necessary to value and invoke embodied wisdom and to acknowledge Multiplicities from wisdom of other species ; inclusive of other; more than human, cattle, wolves, bears, adders, insects, birds, plants for food, moving medicines and transcendental invocations. More than transindividual spirits help to protect, affect, to integrate, assimilate, aspirate, sense, emote, dream and to imagine. The landscape and heritage ‘affect’ us : our affections are movements of intensity through the mesolithic, neolithic, virtual fields.
There are metaphors that spring to mind when thinking about movement, the body and not knowing:
Which way to turn
Whether coming or going
What the other hand is doing
Which path to follow
What to do with myself
Throughout my training and work as a new dance movement psychotherapist I have found, staying with the unknown, a key skill to master and something that I have to keep in the foremost of my awareness. The therapy arena is one in which assumptions and bias are accepted and challenged and my embodied sense of what ‘I know’ about a client is often ‘grainy’. This reminds me of Gendlin’s description of ‘felt sense’ and my urge as a keen dance movement psychotherapist to ’ be doing therapy’ and making a difference, may cause me to leap quixotically into the omnipotent realm of claiming ; ‘ I know what you are thinking and feeling’ and I know how to fix that. Embodied Self- reflection is imperative whilst leaping into the canoe and paddling down river with rapids of assumption and prejudice frequently to ride out.
To counter this, an embodied buoyant act of maintaining afloat is needed to authentically stay with a client’s experience in dance movement psychotherapy. Because fixing and helping can be a seductive intervention, that may lead a therapist to move into an embodied story, instead of witnessing or moving slowly towards a depth of the river that needs to be prepared for, instead of wading further along without consideration of a client’s pace, capacity, desire, choice or empowerment. It is tempting for a therapist to look for the substance – the meat and veg of the work.
A reality in ‘reading other minds’ is that if a client’s experience is overly interpreted through words an important piece of information may be lost or buried as quickly as it emerged; indeed sometimes there are no words or movement, then what happens ? What happens when there is no content or it is not clear, when a client sits down holding his head, gaze, torso like a lead weight towards the ground, as a therapist sometimes the only impression I am left with is one of confusion and a subjective desire to make an interpretation.
Recently I experienced this counter transference as I watched a client sweep from a flailing waving of arms high above his head with his words that he wanted to get rid of a certain behaviour and thoughts that stopped him from opening up to others, limiting his recovery. I imagined his sense of self lacked cohesion, yet this metallization alone left me feeling like I was in the shadow of the not knowing, I searched for my feeling felt? I turned my gaze away from him and the small bubble that he seemed to have constructed surrounding himself.
I felt alone, closed off, insufficient, unknowable, in the dark and this I concluded was the important information for me, I was treading water and it was my task to experience my counter/transference, it circled me around the centre of my body as if it was a rubber ring keeping me afloat, somehow offering support but keeping me from racing ahead. It was something to hold onto and it enabled me as therapist to hold my client in mind and body, as I modelled this basic metallization feature to my client.
As I realised this my knees and spine softened and my breath deepened, I wondered if staying with the unknown had enable me to challenge the fixed rigid central nervous system, false self and ideas that emerged in the therapy space of the hour.
It can be a scary thought that nothing has certainty, stability, fixedness in the body/mind of experience, however the more I discover, the more resilient I become and the greater capacity for holding the unknown, for me it twists and turns like a river or a Mobius strip, I thought to myself how change winds me and I move it.
Since March, I’ve been conducting a set of video/audio interviews about the history of the Northcott Theatre. These interviews have provided a lively counter-point to the fascinating finds in the archive, and have been enormously helpful in filling in some of the gaps between the events captured in newspaper articles and production photos.
I’ve been finishing up the editing of these interviews, and as I complete each set, I will post a short audio clip or two from each interviewee. The first of these interviews was with emeritus Professor Peter Thomson, a long-serving member of staff at the University of Exeter Drama Department.
Prof Thomson reflected upon the early years of the theatre, and in particular, the first two Artistic Directors: Tony Church (1967-1970) and Jane Howell (1971-1973).
Artistic Director Tony Church, performing in The Bastard King (1968). Image courtesy of photographer Nicholas Toyne.
I have often wondered about the concepts of cohesion and ambivalence in psychotherapeutic literature and practice , I have sometimes sensed moral judgement around such concepts as if balance or inbetween is in some way a position to escape, so my thoughts today are around what I would call a position of being on the edge or when shifts are taking place in a persons experience and how change reflects in the body.
I have had the opportunity to work with persons whose world and ground may be shifting, constantly changing and the ground moving under their feet rapidly.
The embodied feeling of instability or lack of solid ground, I have felt in my body when with clients with dementia, parkinsons disease, anxiety and mental health challenges. When I am with such a client I seem to notice a deep need in me to fall to the ground, curl up or wrap myself into or around a shell anything to form a protection with weight against what feels like a stormy sea moving inside of or around my body.
One client with described her illness; as a feeling of being in limbo another as her life slipping away from her and I wonder how I as a therapist can help a person to build a more secure ground for themselves, because my sense of feeling unsafe has been so strong in the presence of this. The paradox may be to be find solidity, whilst accepting that in certain ways our bodies, movement and lives are constantly changing and require a flexibility from us.
It is also curious that this lived experience may be viewed as justifiable fear or insecurity of loss may not fit into a psychoanalytical idea of resistance and stuckness, it seems that stillness, consistency and uneventfulness may be required in a fast spinning world in which we are literally pinned down by gravity or constant demands of perfection achievement and quick fix, an upgrade culture. As one client said, ‘ I just want to hold onto things … I don’t want to let go of things’. It reminded me of Marina Rova’s embodied research in dance movement psychotherapy and dementia called ‘De Mentis: Silent Stories’ (2010-2011), where a mover is embodying an experience of dementia, as she clings onto her memories, experiences and photos that are slipping away, dropped, lost, dispersed yet treasured.
In spiritual practices it is often chanted as a simple guide to life to let go of things and I have always been bothered by the lack of weight given to this kind of assertion as if it is as simple as taking a drink of water. My sense is that until we have felt enough of a meaningful experience with objects or in relationship it may be difficult to move on or let go and spontaneously attune and adapt.
Me and my nephew- part of my self-care is going home to see my family.
Last week I posted the first installment of “The many definitions of self-care.” Self-care is a tremendously important topic among the dance/movement therapy (DMT) community, and of all helping professions, because in order to help others we must first take care of ourselves. Instead of writing about my own personal viewpoint of self-care, I reached out to my DMT community and messaged dance/movement therapists, DMT educators, and DMT students asking them to define self-care in a short paragraph or simple list of activities. I hope to highlight how self-care is indeed a personal practice; a practice that must be molded to fit our unique needs. Once again I was blown away by the answers I received- there is something so beautiful about witnessing others in their own personal introspection. This time around I was reminded…
WHAT IS THE EFFECTIVENESS OF DMT TECHNIQUES WHEN WORKING WITH PTSD
Critical Literature Review Abstract
This review is a first attempt to show the effectiveness of three techniques from the treatment of PTSD used in DMT with the help of articles from other fields of
psychotherapy that use similar principles.
Keywords: effectiveness, dance movement therapy, body-oriented psychotherpy, trauma
Introduction
Trauma is a body wound or shock produced by sudden physical injury (Koch 2011- 8). It is a psychological reaction that occurs after experiencing a highly stressing event outside the range of normal human experience and that is usually characterized by depression, anxiety, flashbacks, recurrent nightmares, and avoidance of reminders of the event.
Based on the empirically supported premise that the body, mind and spirit are interconnected, the American Dance Therapy Association defines dance/movement therapy as the psychotherapeutic use of movement to further the emotional, cognitive, physical and social integration of the individual. In the whole review the…
It’s an interesting topic and how I dance with that depends on how I interpret the word ‘drives’ I suppose. I could talk about Freud’s aggressive and sexual impulses in drive theory, but I would rather address one of my main drives – as sharing knowledge of embodied practice towards development, which can result in personal and societal empowerment, communication and healing, as we focus on the integrated body and mind.
If I use Laban Movement Analysis, I consider my main drive in life to be the action drive:
My view is that my body provides the vessel and vitality to physically impact and intra-act with the world, it is my body that is the starting point for me to become through movement, I guess I think of it in terms of the material body as primary, if we have any essence at all.
I recently re-read my master’s thesis in preparation for my co-presentation at this year’s American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) Annual Conference. As a side note, don’t do that unless you absolutely have to. It’s torture to read it and find mistakes, which if you were in the state of mind I was in at the end of my thesis process, you’ll find a few. As I was reading through it I found one particular sentence that struck me: “The culmination of the flexibility in the [group] structure and the holding environment [I] created gave space for my co-researchers’ creativity and capacity to reflect on our group process and our interpersonal relationships.” This particular sentence still resonates with me as a professional dance/movement therapist and very much defines the type of dance/movement therapist I try to be.
Sharing Embodied Affects 