Time, Space, and an Aesthetics of Survival: Dance/Movement Therapy and Embodied Imagination After Unimaginable Loss

David Alan Harris

Each art has its own imbricated techniques of repetition, the critical and revolutionary potential of which must reach the highest possible degree, to lead us from the drear}' repetitions of habit to the profound repetitions of memory, and ultimately to the [symbolic] repetitions of death, through which we make sport of our own mortality.

Gilles Deleuze, Repetition el difference'

INTRODUCTION

Dance/movement therapy (DMT)—imbued with the vital energies of dance itself—exhibits an unusual capacity for fostering resilience, restoration, and recovery in the aftermath of severe traumatic suffering, including that associated globally with the atrocities of war and organized violence. Deconstructing what dance means in relevant sociocultural contexts, as in the war-torn West African region highlighted in this chapter, may help gauge this healing modality’s value in such settings. As experienced virtually everywhere, dance is both a visual and a temporal phenomenon; it invariably entails witness of the human body, in space, as in time, deliberately transformed. Cultures worldwide consecrate a range of human experience through dance—often by sacralizing spaces and in them marking a rhythm in time’s passage, manifest through human bodies moving: These are processes that dance/movement therapists may usefully replicate.

If prepared to investigate dance and dance aesthetics with an awareness of context through an analytical lens borrowed from cultural anthropology, DMT’s practitioners may engage with the art form’s elemental components of time and space. Doing so can foster insight and well-being in the face of debilitating illness, mental torment, and mortality itself.

In 2005, as a newly registered dance/movement therapist, I relocated from the United States to Sierra Leone for a couple of years in order to supervise paraprofessional counselors in a nongovernmental torture rehabilitation program across four towns in the rural Kaila-hun District. At the millennium’s start, Sierra Leone was perhaps the world’s least developed country—with the highest infant and child mortality, and lowest life expectancy, at only 38 (UNICEF, 2000). Kailahun was then not only the nation’s remotest district but arguably its most war-ravaged as well. My arrival there came four years after a demilitarization that officially marked the end of a ruthless conflict characterized by massive violence against noncombatants. In the capricious course of its 11 years, the war had decimated almost every sector of Kailahun society, cruelly uprooting nearly the entire local populace—with the vast majority of survivors eventually fleeing for refuge in nearby Guinea. While most of Kaila-hun’s refugees had been repatriated by the time of my arrival, across the district practically no shelter of any kind remained intact and rare were the survivors unaffected by the ubiquitous physical traces of terror. During wartime, corrugated zinc roofs had been melted downfoi' munitions, and few houses had been repaired five years after the war’s end. In Koindu, a town where I conducted much of my work, huge craters in the central mosque’s minarets reminded everyone daily that the war had left unscathed not even the sacred house of Allah.

My role in training and supervising Kailahun’s paraprofessional psychosocial counselors for the Center for Victims of Torture entailed helping them upgrade services to recently returned war refugees and developing programming to facilitate recovery. In four towns across the district, we launched community healing initiatives and conducted public health workshops, among them trainings designed to inform local leaders about the impact of violence on vulnerable populations. In addition, while running four DMT groups for adolescents and young adults, I supervised nearly 100 short-term counseling groups that addressed a range of ages.

DESOMATIZING MEMORY

Developing a DMT practice for 21st-century application in developing world contexts with people who have endured the worst of war and organized violence may necessitate taking an inclusive approach to what constitutes dance, as well as what constitutes healing, and reframing their merger. The discipline of DMT was first fashioned in the middle of the 20th century by creative women in the United States and countries in Europe whose understandings of both psychotherapy and dance as an art form were intrinsic to the cultures in which they lived and worked. In the intervening decades, the prevailing definition of dance has expanded exponentially, even in the global North’s art dance venues. After U.S. composer John Cage (1961) had produced a score that consisted entirely of “silence,” and his partner, choreographer Merce Cunningham, had divorced dancing from music entirely, it did not take long for dance practitioners in many places to redefine their work as something of any possible scale involving human bodies of any kind moving—or remaining motionless—in time and space. Dance/movement therapy has evolved along with broader multicultural developments, and contributions to DMT from the rich dance and movement practices of Africa and its diaspora have grown increasingly pervasive as well. It is in this deliberately inclusive spirit of the meaning of dance that this chapter incorporates description of ritualized acts, including private ceremonies performed in secluded spaces, as well as vast choreographed processions that fill entire streets for transformative ends.

In recent decades, evidence has likewise grown that healing the psychological wounds of war and organized violence depends in part on facilitating embodiment of a revitalized imagination. Survivors of war crimes and egregious human rights violations may carry in their musculatures and nervous systems the imprint of that abuse—potentially until the end of their days. It is not uncommon for survivors, especially those who have faced the threat of extinction, to undergo frequent reliving in mind and body of the horrifying events that they had witnessed or endured. The central goals of therapy in the aftermath of such life-threatening incidents, as leading psychotraumatologist Bessel van der Kolk (1996) has cogently explained, are “taming the associated terror and desomatizing the memories’’ (p. 205).

Advances in neurobiological research in recent decades are constantly reshaping understandings of how memory functions and what such posttraumatic recovery entails. Psychological theorists have differentiated two types, or systems, of memory, each associated with a discrete part of the human brain: (a) implicit memory, linked to the amygdala, and (b) explicit, or declarative memory, linked to the hippocampus (Ogden, Minton, & Pain, 2006). Desomatizing, a notion that van der Kolk apparently coined, inherently involves integrating the two systems, such that memories stored, not as lucid and logical narratives, but in fragmented traces of sensory information, may “collaborate” (van der Kolk, 2014, p. 176) in generating a coherent, balanced response to even threatening stimuli. Research underscores the possibility that such integration, letting survivors “feel fully alive in the present and move on with their lives,” can be accomplished from the “bottom up,” that is, by enabling “the body to have experiences that deeply and viscerally contradict the helplessness, rage, or collapse that result from trauma” (van der Kolk, 2014, p. 3). It follows that dancing can play a significant role in such a process, as is documented in the narratives in this chapter.

SUSTAINING RHYTHM

During my Kailahun tenure as trauma clinician and trainer, on numerous occasions I joined our psychosocial counseling team in facilitating community discussions about the recently concluded war and its impact. On an airless morning in March 2005, in Koindu, an outpost within walking distance of the Liberian and Guinean borders, we gathered a group of some 50 primary school students in a central schoolhouse to speak about a video we had screened for them the day before. The documentary, produced in tandem with the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, shared findings from the Commission’s investigation into the fighting, its origins, and its aftermath.

On this occasion we drew the classroom’s backless benches closely together in a circle in the hope that intimacy might help contain and hold difficult emotions. The facilitating counselor began by affirming the normalcy of feeling upset about the cruelties witnessed in life, especially of the kind suffered during the war. He then opened the floor to the children’s comments on what they had seen in the video. Early on, a small girl of around ten put up her hand and timidly asked to speak. Grasping her green school-uniform skirt in one hand, she rose to her feet, and in a rambling dissertation on events that had taken place some years before, told her peers about her wartime ordeals. Captured with an uncle by rebels in Liberia, she had witnessed them stage a sort of lottery for him—writing three possible modes of execution on slips of paper, dropping them into a pot, and forcing the man himself to draw from the vessel the slip with his inscribed destiny—as if his fate had been preordained by an avenging deity. Rather than being shot blindfolded, she said, or drowned in a nearby stream, the kindly man who cared for her after her parents’ killings was scalded to death with boiling oil. Quietly sharing her inescapable memories with us, this little child, who would not have been older than six or seven at the time of the events she narrated, had been forced to watch it all.

Like her peers, we counselors were shaken by the little girl’s indelible images of horror. Working to counter the collective impulse to dissociate in response—to drift away from the classroom and begin to revisit mentally the terrors of the recent past, perhaps in the process to fall prey to utter and unending hopelessness—we opted to introduce a technique that encourages grounding in current bodily reality. I whispered to staff a common DMT adage, “Rhythm creates a holding environment,” a principle, echoing Winnicott’s (1971) landmark formulation, which I had shared with the counselors for application in our groups and community events of all sorts. Hoping to ease a return to the present moment, we urged all of the children to come to their feet and to sing a familiar song, knowing that when singing together the pupils would unite in clapping, swaying, and stepping to the music of their own making. In sensing, as they sang, the floor’s solidity under their feet and the very resonance of their own vocal cords, they would perhaps be equipped to evade momentarily the perilous siren call toward an inward journey back to a space and time of omnipresent danger. Instead, they might find in their own bodies a place of safety, surrounded by friends and caring adults. It was clear that as survivors of horrific atrocities, these children would have to learn to live with what could never be forgotten. Moving together to music may have provided at best an impermanent solution, yet the emotional regulation it afforded them in this particular moment was undeniable and swift—and as such may have furthered another day’s survival.