On Wednesday, I had a class at a women's shelter to remain anonymous. I have taught there for almost two years. I hadn't been there in a while, due to scheduling issues. The director is amazing. I love watching her teach mothers how to take care of their infants and toddlers. Many of the children attend this class with their moms, and we find creative ways to incorporate them, but it's a challenge.

It's the second time I have been able to get them to lie on the floor. Sometimes a homeless women won't lie down, because it frightens them to lie down on the ground; it reminds them of a horrible memory. Sometimes it's because they are so weary, and are in a level of pain where they feel like they cannot get up off of the ground; they don't want to put themselves there and then feel embarrassed because they cannot get up. Usually I am teaching this movement therapy class with the homeless women seated in chairs, around a table, with kids swaddled in blankets being passed around the circle.

But then, I have worked with businessmen, scientists, secretaries, that cannot feel the ground underneath them. And I cannot say they were any saner, but I can say they had health insurance, a gym membership, and weren't too worried about where they were going to sleep. I have actually found that clients in recovery take to the work like a duck to water, much more so that someone who is a low-level, functional addict. Their recovery rate is ten times faster, they are much more open to accept neuromuscular changes in their bodies, and the relief they feel is most welcome and nonthreatening. They also are like sponges when it comes to absorbing information about their bodies, asking many questions of me.

Shelters kick people out as a form of punishment, even those that help teenagers. If they find a homeless person being too unruly, the shelters also punish them in varying levels of severity; indoor confinement, single-day suspensions, and suspensions that can last months. This is for the protection of the other clients, and I don't blame them for feeling like doing it, but it makes our work so much more important and necessary. There isn't a home anywhere for them. A major factor in the recuperation of an addict is re-assimilation, re-acculturation into the world. There is a whole societal indoctrination in the world of drugs and prostitution that needs to be unraveled, and the physical relationship to the drugs and the life as it relates to identity needs to be confronted and identitified, as a single gesture has the power to set of a memory association to the drug, and encourage a relapse even years after recovery. The homeless, whether or not they are addicts, need to re-learn how to function in order to join us in a different function.

In the case of many homeless teenagers, they just need to learn how to function period, on the most rudimentary level. They sometimes need to learn how to bathe themselves, because nobody bothered to teach them. Nobody cared. They went from foster home to group home without anybody noticing them. This knowledge has made me look differently at an unkept homeless person on the street. It is quite possible that nobody ever taught him how to take care of himself.

All of this is why our work is really, REALLY important. Nurturing the shelter community is just as important as the physical healing element of the movement therapy, the knowledge and training through the discussions about their bodies, their eating habits, and how to take care of themselves, or the individual expressivity and communication elements with the musical instruments and the dance. It's all about interrelating the body to the self in the world, and it's all important. Our work, I think, is most powerful when the different elements are joined together so that they relate to each other.

Phoenix Rising Homeless Project - Beginning Stages

7/3/2010 Two weeks ago, I mounted "Rain Dance!!!" on the roof of Covenant House, the first dance piece to be created entirely with the staff and clients of a homeless shelter...almost. We ended up including recorded music by Laurie Anderson, Zbigniew Preisner and the Temptations in the end.

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.