DMT WITH ADOLESCENT FEMALES
Fourteen months later I sat on the floor in a dingy secondary school classroom in Kaila-hun town. A woman and a man—both DMT/counseling trainees—joined me on woven-plastic prayer mats spread over the cement floor. Shutters were closed tight to keep out the blazing midday heat, and the room’s rough-hewn wooden benches and tables had been pushed to the darker peripheries. We were co-facilitating the eighth of ten DMT sessions, and on this occasion we had already improvised together with our clients in a circle to some of their favorite Sierra Leonean hip-hop. Now we would wait in quiet expectation as three of the group’s six members (all female, aged 14 to 16) were about to bring to life challenging scenes from their personal histories. Joined by a couple of their peers, we formed their audience.
As survivors of the war, these teens might well have chosen to depict vicious acts of violence that had undoubtedly shaped their early childhoods. But as the scenes unfolded before us, it was clear that more recent events were on their hearts: deaths of family members, events that had repeatedly stolen these group members’ homes from them, along with their sense of safety and belonging. A 14-year-old orphan had already chosen from among her peers the actors to play the roles in her family drama. (Here I will call her “Siawoh”2—in remembrance of another of my paraprofessional counselor trainees who left psychosocial work and entered nursing only to become among the first fatalities of the Ebola outbreak that ravaged the district in 2014.) In this session, Siawoh had tears in her eyes while witnessing the actor who portrayed her uncle drive the peers playing her aunt and herself from their home.
At the role-play’s end, Siawoh arose quietly, ready to assume a part in another group member’s very similar story. Siawoh knew the scenario, and despite a tendency to hide her emotional life, she had been cast as the lead by her peer, “Aminata,” a friend who had taken a place among us to watch. Three times in recent years, Aminata, too, had been driven from her home, and before that she had surely joined the refugee caravans to Guinea and back. Accordingly, in the drama’s first scene, Aminata’s elder sister, desperate and unable to feed and shelter one more dependent, kicked the young protagonist out of the house. When in the next scene the child went to live with her father, he died suddenly, leaving her bereft and subject once more to immediate dislocation. For Aminata at this juncture, being made homeless persuaded her elder sister to shelter her again. In the subsequent scene, though, the sister unexpectedly grew ill and perished, leaving the child permanently on her own.
Tasked with portraying the enormity of the grief inherent in this daunting succession of losses, Siawoh, who minutes before had tears in her eyes while watching her own recent history, stunned her audience with an improvised response. With no hint of physical preparation, she catapulted herself into the air and crashed hard onto the cement floor—missing entirely the portion covered by prayer mats. It is the single most violent movement I have ever encountered in the context of DMT, and in that moment it knocked the breath out of us spectators. Shuddering, we felt then as if we too had plummeted without a net into this cold, hard reality, and maybe risked dashing our brains out upon impact.
Dance/movement therapists comprehend such identification with the performer, in this case the moment’s perception that we share in Siawoh’s risk of serious injury, as indicative of what we term kinesthetic empathy—an empathy experienced through witnessing another’s body movement (Berger, 1972). This phenomenon is now widely considered hard-wired by mirror neurons (Berrol, 2006) and thus is unlikely to be culture-bound.
In the moment of Siawoh’s dive, I shuttled in my mind back to fourth grade: When looking the wrong way while running fast through a gym, I had snapped my right clavicle against an interior brick corner. The collision in fact had propelled me onto my back unconscious, and this bodily memory in the Kailahun classroom signaled to me strong evidence of somatic countertransference with my therapy client, the performer sprawled on the floor in front of us. At the same time, I recognized the need to resume my professional monitoring role. Making eye contact with my supervisees, I joined them in surveying the frightening scene and quickly forming a nonverbal consensus not to stop the action but instead to let the powerful narrative unfurl without pause.
In embodying her friend at a moment of tragic loss, Siawoh transformed herself entirely from the member of the group who most typically shied away from showing authentic feelings to a virtuosic performer capable of using her body to convey extreme emotional pain—undoubtedly, her own, as much as that of her friend. Upon learning of “her” sister’s death, Siawoh threw herself onto the unyielding floor, and wailing there, rolled in Kailahun’s omnipresent dust. Her crying looked as real as the fresh dirt stains that appeared on her clothing, and she seemed to hold nothing back. Performing this role apparently enabled Siawoh to vent emotions associated with her own story, which she had been holding inside for a long time.
REINVENTING RITUAL PROCESS IN DANCE
It remains remarkable that Siawoh was uninjured, despite the treacherous improvised dive. Surely, her daring as a performer was attributable in part to the impetuosity of adolescence, for in her own daily life, recklessness was indeed an issue. There are a number of plausible explanations, moreover, for the apparent absence of physical consequences from her crash onto the unforgiving floor. Csiksentmihaliyi’s (1975) notion of “flow” may plausibly explain the apparent absence of physical consequences. Siawoh had entered a zone of total involvement where “[a]ction and awareness are experienced as one” (Turner, 1977a, p. 47). In an ultimate state of flow, she proved impervious to bodily pain, even while portraying agony to the audience: Flow; and the fearlessness she embodied in that state, allowed her to repudiate the very prospect of fragility. It was as if denial itself, of such mundane realities as bruised muscles and fractured bones, offered her an otherworldly power to survive, as if not giving into mortal fears afforded a protective amulet to shield against injury. Likely, the body-mind warm-up she had undergone in the course of all-out dancing to Sierra Leonean popular music minutes before primed her to manage this uncalculated risk. In turn, it enabled her crossing into a liminal space where she might defy the bounds of quotidian reality.
That afternoon, like everyone in the darkened, dusty Kailahun classroom, I was aware of the pivotal ritual process to which Siawoh’s perilous dance alluded. The previous year, just weeks after my arrival in Kailahun, I had joined co-workers in traveling over nearly impassable roads to a tiny village deep in the forest—a trek made to honor a recently deceased staff member on the occasion of a pivotal funeral commemoration, his 40-day ceremony. Upon reaching the village, our crew walked solemnly past its collection of mud and thatch huts. People of all ages had positioned themselves, barely mobile—standing, sitting, squatting, or crouching—on a hard-packed earthen yard in front of one of the houses. There we noticed a very thin woman, one of the older people present, and as we discovered, elder sister of the deceased. She abruptly rose up into the air, slammed her body hard onto the dirt, and pulsed there in sobs. As she cried out, her wails turned first into keening, and then to a repeating phrase, piteously sung in her tribal language. I was mesmerized and somewhat stunned by the mourner’s performance, but no one else appeared to pay her the least attention. The entire village seemed instead to look away as she bore the sorrow for everyone and all alone let grief’s gaping wound bleed in public.
There is a widespread assumption that such performative rituals in traditional cultures function conservatively as phenomena that enable humans to endure time’s passage untrammeled by change. But this view is problematic. Indeed, Victor Turner (1977a), a prominent anthropologist of ritual (1920-1983), illuminated cultural rites’ transformative capacities. Countering views of ritual as inflexible containers for upholding the status quo, he indicated that “tribal rituals are anything but rigid. . . . [W]hile there are fixed, stereotyped sequences of symbolic action, there are also episodes given over to verbal and nonverbal improvisation” (p. 35).
Turner (1977a, 1977b) thus highlighted aspects of the ritual process in which imaginative experimentation emerges. He drew significantly from van Gennep’s (1873—1957) analyses of three distinct temporal phases in rites of passage: (1) separation from society, (2) transition through the threshold, or limen, into an otherworldly space/time where possibilities seem endless, and (3) reaggregation into society with revised status following the transition. In particular, the second, liminal phase—for Turner a gateway to social reversal and transformation—allowed for the possibility of significant innovation, and potentially, utter communal joy. Moreover, he deemed “the liminal in socio-cultural process . . . similar to the subjunctive mood in verbs—just as mundane socio-cultural activities resemble the indicative mood,” (Turner, 1977a, p. 33). Hence, liminality, or “being-on-the-threshold,” constitutes a playfully subjunctive space/time as if apart from daily reality, and the sacralized borders of liminality frame a potentiality for “enchantment, subversion, and change” (Harris, 2009, p. 97).
Within the safe therapeutic container of our DMT group, Siawoh’s dramatic abandon enlivened for all of us present her people’s funeral tradition. In the process, while risking nothing short of fatality in a place lacking even emergency medicine, she created a meta-performance. Indeed, her startling physical portrayal, as understood within the context of a country still in mourning five years after the end of a decade’s ruthless civil war, inhabited multiple valences of meaning. Siawoh not only powerfully transformed the distress over her own personal history of significant losses while evincing at once her friend’s grief, but simultaneously danced an image that made for a resonant symbol of her entire people’s survival in the midst of unspeakable devastation and despair.
Nearly every person we encountered in our Kailahun outreach had named the inability to perform the obligator)' rites for deceased loved ones as the bitterest experience of their lives—more horrible than even the butchery they had witnessed. In the absence of these vital ceremonies, the deceased forever lacked what was needed to transition from this brutal world to the kinder next one. Lyotard (1977), dissecting Freud’s corpus, identified the unconscious as stage director (metteur en scène), mounting public performances. In replicating a funeral rite, Siawoh may well have assumed a role staged by the collective unconscious of her people. Whether or not she engaged the strategy deliberately, she appropriated a performative ritual movement idiom from the public square and privatized it for a small coterie of spectators, thereby advancing a critical symbolic purpose, the fulfillment of duties required throughout Sierra Leone for passage from this world to the next. She thereby achieved a level of impact sought by choreographers everywhere and likewise brought to our DMT group session the liminal possibility of healing, our core therapeutic enterprise.
Rituals, in Kailahun and globally, buttress cultural understandings of mortality and not only represent but become the continuity of the life-force in the face of death. Siawoh’s breathtaking choreography—including her virtuosic, head-first dive into oblivion—illustrated the reflexivity through which, as Turner (1977a) put it, “a group or community seeks to portray, understand, and then act on itself” (p. 33). Her performance was at once an intimate improvisation and a timeless expression for herself and her grief-struck friend alike of their people’s faith that death is but a pause in an endless flow of being.
