4. Searching for meaning, not problems to solve

“Out of the unconscious the conscious world is born.” (Lerner and McKinney, 2002:80)

Having lived with childhood trauma, music and dance has always been my harbour of survival. Rhythmic motion to dynamic music seemed to balance my disassociated mind and body as it kept me hungering for more release of ecstatic energy within the physical realms of my body. I felt strong in these moments. As a teenager, I hated the image of my own body but I learned to respect ‘the’ body as a powerful instrument of expression. Through the devoted study of physical skills with a dedicated dance teacher, and a dance technique within the Western Classical Ballet, I fine-tuned a bodily kinesthetic awareness. I also learnt how ‘a’ dancer’s body might safely channel my ‘unknown’ and unpredictable explosive anger and creatively redirect my suppressed volatile emotions. Dancing is where I could escape to feel calm and present to the moment. This is demonstrated in my Higher School Certificate in 1981, Dance at Sunrise at the Ford Theatre, Geelong Performing Arts Centre.

Graduating in Dance Education at university gave me the opportunity to acknowledge my kinesthetic intelligence (Gardiner, 1985). The recognition from my culture gave me the opportunity to be professionally employed using my artistic skill and knowledge as a choreographer and to create numerous school musical productions as well as designing dance curricula in schools that had never experienced the empowering nature of dance as an expressive art form. My experience as a teacher affirmed my confidence as a communicator with young people and developed my ability as a determined advocate of Dance in schools. I could ‘see’ that my teaching impacted upon my secondary school students’ development of artistic knowledge and skills as well as their self-esteem and confidence. I enjoyed observing my students’ learning progression and felt like I was contributing to their personal development as young women as well as dancers who were independent thinkers. And yet in my personal life I was attracting extremely violent and abusive relationships.

The formation of my community dance company, Wild Moves provided me with the opportunity to explore these complex social issues for example, The Nicene Hymn for the Fringe Festival in 1993. As a choreographer, I could safely explore and ‘look at’ my fear by carefully controlling and aesthetically arranging organised patterns of movement in response to a stimulus or idea for dance making; in this case violence on women. I was able to plan structured improvisations that facilitated spontaneous movement exploration of this theme from my dancers. Their movement response revealed and reflected back to me what I could safely ‘look at’ from a distance. I could get my dancers to express my feelings whilst exploring their own. I could artistically make decisions with sensitivity towards my dancers’ movement response because I ‘saw’ my own fragile self-image and the need to survive it or cope with it in my busy life by ‘masking’ it in the artistic realm.  I could get ‘dancers’ to perfectly execute my emotions into structured thematic choreographic form. I was able to safely speak my feelings through the dance.

 

“Dancing is rhythmic movement that ‘speaks’ of joy and sorrow, of love and hate, of hope and fear. It can describe the world inside me and the world around me. It can be as gentle as the rocking of a cradle or as violent as an explosion” (Borten, 1993:1).

Choreographic arrangement allowed me to catch a glimpse of my ‘bigger picture’ whilst remaining detached and removed from my emotions. My body didn’t have to have ownership over the expressed feelings I was asking of my dancers in a collaborative choreographic process. This was very evident in my 1994 choreographic work, Lust, Love & Lament for The  Caulfield Arts Complex. But have I ever given myself enough time in my life to stop and recognise, acknowledge and reflect upon this ‘picture’ of my personal self and who, what, when, why or how I create the dance work that I passionately pursue? It’s much more employable as well as enjoyable to keep on creating, teaching, producing and collaborating between intercultural and cross-cultural groups such as 2002, Deaf Olympics Opening Ceremony at the Melbourne Olympic Park. The affects are immediate and the social change can consistently ripple through the culture like the eighteenth year of the Return of the Sacred Kingfisher Festival at CERES Environment Park; a festival that I initiated celebrating a little bird returning to its original stamping ground as a result of cleaning up and regenerating the Merri Creek in Brunswick, Victoria. Up until now, life has been more meaningful by helping others rather than focusing on how the dance has helped to shape my identity, respect and value of my body.

However, I would now like to journey into this macro-perspective  (Vissicarro, 2004) to unpack how I have explored these personal and social issues through the ‘safety’ of my art form or choreographic practice. Not only through performance, , so as my community can see a reflection of themselves as a people living in a shared space for example, as in A celebration of Australia’s Federation at Gasworks Arts Park with Indonesian, Chinese, Greek and African Communities for the Australian Dance Council in 2001. But to also ‘unpack’ and begin to  ‘recognise’ or ‘look at’ how my creative exploration has served as a cushion for my anger and brought meaning into my life.

I lived a busy life submerged in creative projects of teaching and performing that essentially guide others to a sense of self worth, self efficacy and positive self image whilst attracting destructive relationships to myself (Bass & Davis, 1997.) Making dances and teaching African and Contemporary or Creative dance to young children, adolescents and adults as a community arts practitioner began the learning journey to heal myself. Creating new contemporary dance works for young people, migrants and community groups from the inspiration of African dance not only provided a frame of reference for a thematic approach in cross-cultural dance that fostered reconciliation and emancipation but also facilitated a positive self image for the groups involved and guided me to reclaim and honour my own sense of self worth as a human being This was evident in Children of the Blue Light performed and filmed in the Cape Coast Castle, Ghana, West Africa (Dreessens, 2007).

I would like to track how I have lived my life through the expressive intentions of my choreographic works and critically examine how I was able to redirect my powerful emotions safely through the movement patterns and design of the dance work that were expressed through my dancers. How did my hidden self find a voice through the inspiration of the African culture and transform into a new contemporary dance work? How did I dance my way to an understanding of self through my choreography? How might I have used my art form as a method to survive my childhood trauma and cope with my adult lived experience?

I hope to provide a model not for how readers in the same situation ought to be or do but to give them the benefit of experiencing how I had acted and felt in these extreme situations and was then able to safely explore my personal and social issues through an artistic medium or choreographic process. I want to provide a story to which readers could compare their own experiences. So my goal is to practice an artful, poetic and empathic social science that is written rather than danced, in which readers can keep in their minds and feel in their bodies the “complexities of concrete moments of lived experience” (Ellis, 2004:26).

In today’s climate of cultural diversity within our Australian multicultural society, many migrants arrive on our doorstep escaping political instability and trauma in their mother country and bring their personal stories to the classroom. I explored these issues in Kingfisher Sanctuary for Return of the Sacred Kingfisher Festival, CERES Environment Park in 2002. My research could also serve as a model for therapeutic artistic movement exploration of these social issues that could be implemented in a community dance project; or problem-solving activities through movement using inquiry based learning that implement social issues as a stimulus for dance making in the classroom and across the curriculum (Dreessens, 2009). My research could provide a model for cross-cultural choreographic methods that can interweave the stories of diverse cultural backgrounds within the one community. By presenting my research, I would hope that this model would also serve as an example of the need for dance education in the school and the community through which the lived experience can become meaningful in the face of trauma and how the creative choreographic process is a microcosm in which I found my identity as a woman being able to connect with other people and a sense of shared community space that is safe to live in.

Slide 7: Children of the Blue

How might the choreographic process serve as a rite of passage for reclaiming one’s honour and identity as woman? Suppression is the process of deliberately trying to stop thinking about certain thoughts (Bass & Davis 1988). Re-enacting an enslaved woman tapped me into my own suppressed thoughts of when I was held ‘captive’ as a little girl, then, as a ‘volatile teenager,’ as a ‘beaten girlfriend,’ as an ‘abandoned mother’ and a ‘betrayed wife’ - except with no chains - only with power and control over my own decision-making. In this sense, I have learnt, over my lifetime, not to give my power away and develop a voice to talk back. It comes at no surprise to me that I embraced feminist ethnography as a framework to contextualize my storytelling into a meaningful maze of rich complexity. Creating and producing a film about emancipation from slavery helped me to safely explore my own trauma, while helping others understand the power of dance, as a healing art form and spiritual practice and in so doing helped me, to release a past that is no longer needed to be stored in my body. It is a lived experience that can be shared with others.

Transformational dance is a state of being often explored in movement therapy. Anna Halprin in her book, Five decades of Transformational Dance, asserts that life and art processes are inextricably linked and that the dance possesses a “magical power, a power to heal and transform.”   The close attention to the “self in the act of dancing” may lead to “personal transformation and revelation.” Furthermore, art processes may be community processes, ways of making and sustaining community. This conviction has lead Halprin to create large scale events and rituals involving thousands of participants around the world (Dempster, 1997:122).

“The encounter with ethnographic others is a therapeutic quest for meaning, a search for identity that can be considered a form of healing in the broadest sense … it includes the process of ethnographic writing as well (Danforth, 1989:300).