By Maria Hodermarska, LCAT, RDT/BCT
Life is unpredictable. That can be frightening. When we face disrupting events, we often don’t know what to do. But, we keep thinking we need to do something. Do we always need to do something?
Learning to tolerate instability is a tenant of Buddhism. The reward for a person’s capacity to tolerate the mess of life is, hopefully, an experience of greater freedom and spontaneity.
Drama therapy is concerned, in part, with the performativity of the body and the socially constructed stories and roles, that determine how, why and under what decentering circumstances we feel alone and stuck. Treatment in drama therapy is concerned with building capacity for a multiplicity of self in order to access freedom and spontaneity in our person and in our relationships. It is also concerned with learning about what it means to be (and not to be) with our selves and each other in new ways.
“Life is unpredictable. That can be frightening.”
One theoretical approach to drama therapy, Developmental Transformations (DvT), embraces a destabilization of experience of being that encourages participants to enter into an encounter with another person, not necessarily in the pursuit of a sense of balance, but to increase the capacity for living in life’s hurly-burly. In this theoretical approach to drama therapy, based upon free-associative play, we practice living in the mess, learn to trust our capacities to tolerate uncertainty, disruption and difference. This approach to drama therapy echoes the Buddhist expression, “Don’t just do something. Sit there.” But sitting there is not so easy.
The disrupting aspects of what is performed in our world, the increasing discomfort with the body and embodiment and the invitation to sit in discomfort and instability are also central to French choreographer Jérôme Bel’s work. His Gala was performed at the NYU Skirball Center for Performing Arts in 2018.
The dancers audition remotely with a videotape and are cast and curated by Bel. The dances of Gala themselves are a series of tasks—a turn, a leap, a bow, a Michael Jackson moon walk—interspersed with group dances that resemble flocking or follow the leader. In the performance I saw, a performer who is a capable baton twirler twirled and caught her baton while her peers behind her attempted to follow with their soft, foam tubes.
Gala hits all the marks that I admire personally, aesthetically and clinically. It was messy and imperfect. Its design holds up a mirror to whatever community it is created in so that the community can see itself. It’s joyful. It’s queer. Its politics are inclusive and mutually aspirational. It reminds us to question who are the “professional dancers” in the company. It reminds us that we all have individual talents (not everyone can twirl a baton and send it into the air and catch it) when we see some who can and some who cannot perform that on stage before us.
“Life is unpredictable. That can be frightening. Don’t just do something. Sit there.”
The dance embraces the dramatic worldview from the very beginning through a slide show of stages all over the world. The audience is invited to see or perceive all the world as a stage, and to remember that the stage is everywhere—that we are, indeed, performing for each other all the time.
Yet, I found myself challenged by the performance in other ways. There was a recital-like quality where everyone gets applause for their spin or their bow but I was left to question what the applause was for? Some of the dancers may be living with significant invisible disabilities and their efforts cannot be seen. For example, if a performer lives with joint pain, what effort does it take for them to spin? So in the invitation to embrace difference, a level of ableism remains present. As an applauding audience, we are assessing effort based upon our perception and a reading of a body that may be incomplete. And while the performance invites that thinking, it does not do so in a sophisticated way.
Later in the performance, the audience watched a solo performed by a dancer who appears to be a person living with spina bifida. The audience is invited to the gaze upon the body of the dancer spinning in her wheelchair or crawling on the stage with a spine that can do things that we often don’t see spines do. In this invitation to gaze, we potentially engage empathy. Those of us who do not live with physical disability stare through our discomfort and hold that gaze, and in the holding of the gaze, work our way to compassionate encounter with a body that is different.
But when it was over, I wondered if in gazing upon the body with cerebral palsy or spina bifida or a gender queer presentation, and seeing its beauty, whether that experience had changed my perceptions, or whether I had justified my voyeurism by aestheticizing it? Was I simply persuading myself that I had found beauty? Was my gaze as respectful as I hope it was? Or, was I denying the pain of the mess by my own need the need to find the beauty in what I see and in the way I see it?
Gala certainly had me asking these questions and more. It returned me to the questions of performativity of bodies and socially constructed identities that as a drama therapist I am working with, hopefully with depth and consciousness. Sitting in my discomfort without the ability to avert my gaze, I recognized that I sit in the great instability of the world and face task of tolerating it. In this aesthetic distance, am I more free or am I still oppressing the other? Do I see my freedom as connected to the freedom of the woman with cerebral palsy delighting in her arms and legs akimbo walk across the stage before me. Am I as I sit there and do nothing, watching her, at the same time performing for her a shared vision of a future?
About the Author:
Maria Hodermarska, MA, RDT/BCT, LCAT is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Drama Therapy at New York University. She is a Licensed Creative Arts Therapist (LCAT), a Registered Drama Therapist (RDT) and Board Certified Trainer of Drama Therapy (BCT), a Credentialed Alcoholism and Substance Abuse Counselor (CASAC), and an Internationally Certified Alcohol and Drug Abuse Counselor (ICADAC). Her work spans both the creative and applied psychological uses of the theater arts, most often within NGOs, community-based mental health programs and alcohol/substance abuse treatment programs serving un-served or under-served populations.
Ms. Hodermarska is the coordinator of creative arts therapies for Project Common Bond, an international symposium for young people who have lost a family member to an act of terror, armed or inter-religious conflict. She is former Ethics Chair and current Ethics Committee member for the National Association for Drama Therapy and is a former Education Chairperson for the same organization.
