I obtained about $3,500 worth of musical instruments for them, and have started collecting musicians for a music program, and I am now carrying this concept into other shelters. Wouldn't it be an incredibly healing event to have these amazing drum circles of homeless shelters coming together and supporting each other? Drums have a power. Hand drums send an energy through the body, and there's something about the rhythmical, repeated striking and the reverberance in the body that cuts through depression and anxiety, with room for meditation. Sometimes, all one can do is sit there and hit something. It's a basic developmental human movement; all infants hit things. For some people whose brains are swimming in medication, it clears them.
Although I deeply believe in the profound effect of Somatic Movement Therapy, and use that in our work, I'm not doing any sort of "Dance Therapy", or "Drama Therapy" or "Music Therapy", and I am shying away from obtaining a Master's degree in any of that, or in psychology (though it might be wise...I don't know). My approach really is based in Laban Movement Analysis and the effect that certain elements of Body, Effort, Shape and Space are utilized and enliven the individual with Dance, Theatre, and Music.
It's odd. I really don't want to be a Dance Therapist. I think it's because there's something in me that thinks that a phenominally therapeutic element of this work is the releasing of creativity and owning expressivity, and that these things are put on the back burner when performance art forms are turned into therapy; the exploration of specific psychological elements for certain psychological results stifles something in the process for me. My Movement Therapy background enables me to see things I wouldn't normally see in certain results, guide the journey of the project for them from a perspective of wondering what will happen next, and a very broad mind as to where to take them.
I am not condoning denial, or saying that therapy doesn't have a place, but sometimes it seems that the best way to help someone isn't to swim around in their demons all day. Therapy is wonderful, but it's also good to get away from it. Sometimes things are just good because they are what they are. I am not a fan of requiring clients to perform gestures that intentionally trigger memories, until much later in the work. It's good to bring new movement experiences to them that redefines their bodies.
But what was most important in "Rain Dance!!!" was my improvisational ability, and my ability to adapt very quickly when all sorts of things happen in the shelter that were beyond anyone's control. Interestingly, my adaptability also had an incredibly healing impact on the shelter, as I wasn't freaked out when they were in lockdown and we couldn't rehearse the night before the show, or when clients disappeared, or when the staff forgot about the show entirely and had to be re-reminded, because they work so hard. I just went with it, and made a yummy stew of a dance piece.
I was happily provided with costumes by the San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, and the clients couldn't stop wearing them. They took turns trying them on, not caring about whether it was meant for a man or a woman, and paraded around in them hours after the dance piece ended.
This is also something I am doing as part of my preparation of climbing back into the somatics community, and the Integrated Movement Studies program as I prepare my thesis and presentation. It's been almost five years. I've know amazing scholars who took ten years to finish their dissertation, so I'm not worried.
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