Keywords

Phenomenology, dance-movement therapy, Halprin method, Life/Art Process, Gestalt Therapy

Amanda Levey: Since you wrote the article, and certainly since Anna Halprin started her institute in 1972, there’s been a huge increase in the acceptance of somatic and body-based ideas, particularly in the therapeutic world. But I think what was particular about her work was the inclusion of creativity in movement and dance. There wasn’t just a focus on body awareness, it’s how to express that creatively or symbolically, and so I wonder if you want to talk a little bit about that, particularly in terms of where you have taken the work since you wrote the article that is being published in JoCAT. 

Ursula Schorn: I was trained in dance and music at the Conservatory Mozarteum, Salzburg, and was searching for new pathways into a more creative way of dance and music education. I found what I needed in Anna Halprin’s approach to dance at the Tamalpa Institute. She was weaving together all the creative arts like dancing, drawing, writing, performing. What Anna called “psychokinetic visualisation process”, a basic tool of her Life/Art Process, created a bridge between motion and emotion, the source of creativity in movement, drawing and dance. You suddenly find yourself in a process that really opens a door to a deep understanding of who you are and what you are searching for. And furthermore, Anna freed the dancer from stylised movements – a turning point in the development of movement and dance.

AL: Exactly, yes. Exactly.

US: Margaret H’Doubler, her teacher, was very important for her. Her approach to movement and dance freed the body from stylised concepts and opened the channel between sensing and emotion. And this is such a basic phenomenon she discovered which made movement and dance flow in a wonderful way. The processes were very creative and the creativity and imagination and exploration and performing turned out incredible processes, where all kinds of sources were integrated.

AL: Yes. It makes total sense. And what’s interesting to me is that I came to the programme from the other end, I’d had a psychological training, which I found very limiting. Because it was so cognitive. So for me, going into something that was body-based and connecting the body and the emotions, and then bringing in the cognition, through the imagination was such a different experience. And I was interested that in your article, you talk a lot about Daniel Stern and his writing about that pre-verbal state of being intramodal – being able to have a more globalised sense of one’s experience. And I wonder whether you want to talk a little bit about how you think the psychokinetic visualisation process connects with that more deeper knowing?

US: The process is like this: You move, images appear and you make them visible in a drawing and correspond and express them in movement. What I find very important is that you take a special aspect of the drawing, a graphic gestalt, transform it into movement and then you pass it on to a partner And this is where Daniel Stern’s theory of  affect attunement is coming in, that you don’t just imitate, but you take it, you pick it up  from a partner who doesn’t know where you come from. And this is always very exciting.  When the partner takes the movement and allows themself to be led by it, without trying to find its hidden meaning, this process is beyond words, beyond interpretation or analysis. To really go into the ‘not-knowing’ and let go of all the concepts and interpretations is where my path is leading me. I really want to find out what makes it so amazingly effective when people go into the ‘not-knowing’ and come out being deeply touched by the experience of the very moment, because they suddenly get in touch with the implicit meaning of their experience. I just came back from a workshop I led in Poland, entitled, “Dancing with the Elements of Nature”. And I witnessed participants crying out of joy as they experienced their resonance to nature, nature being a very important aspect of Anna Halprin’s work, finding one’s own inner nature by resonating to the world of nature. And here, again, the strong experience in nature had been expressed in a drawing, a graphic gestalt had been chosen and passed on to another partner, who was led by the chosen motif into movement.  And the witnessing partner responded to the movements which touched the most and integrated them into their personal dance. If the participant’s partner moves the graphic figure in a way that doesn’t resonate in the participant, they leave it. Whatever resonates, will be integrated. The participant has the freedom to decide,  and this principle is experienced as a creative opening of the whole process. As a therapist, I witness and facilitate the process.

AL: Thank you. That was very well expressed. Would you talk a little bit about working in nature, which was something that Anna was very passionate about. 

US: This is what Anna says: We are nature – but we are not really connected with the nature inside of us. So when I do workshops in nature, I lead participants into the process of getting in touch with their inner nature, the elements of nature in their physical bodies, for example the air experienced as their breath. And then we go out into nature, for example to the beach, and their task is to explore the element of air – the wind. And I ask them to get together in small groups to support each other – each member of the group expressing a wish, such as: “Could you please help me to get into the element of air by running with me against the strong wind?” Or: “Could you please lie down with me and let us feel the air on the skin?” Then we go back into the room where we are meeting, and I ask them to sense and visualise the resonance of nature inside of them, by expressing this inner image in a drawing, which is then moved. And here we follow the process of the psychokinetic visualisation, which includes the movement translation. And they realised that they had experienced a kind of healing quality in nature, inside of their own body. 

AL: Beautiful. 

US: Yes, and at the very end of one of these days, I asked them to find one gesture of what they’d had integrated through this process and everyone  expressed their gesture, which simultaneously was moved by the whole group. It turned out like a ritual.

AL: Anna talked a lot about ritual. 

US: Yes, she did. And she led the big ritual – Circle the Earth. I was there in 1985 when we celebrated it with 100 participants. And a few years ago I led a ritual at a memorial site in Germany and I made contact with Anna when she found out that I was working on reconciliation work – [with] Jewish and German participants in San Francisco – co-leading with a therapist, the son of Auschwitz survivors. And then she said, “Ulla, I want you to come and tell me about it because this is very new what you’re doing here”. This is how we connected on a deeper level. Then she asked me to come along to co-teach with her at Esalen. So on this level we connected, which was very special.

AL: Very special. I’m very moved by that use of the work. I think Anna was so identified with America, with the United States. So she did this inter-racial stuff in the United States, which is very important, but didn’t really touch on the Jewish–German thing, which is an interesting thing. 

US: Yes, Anna worked with white and black dancers and was involved with Civil Rights Movement.

AL: Well, I think she probably realised perhaps that it was somewhere she hadn’t been able to go. 

AL: Yeah. And she was always very honest about her limitations. She never pretended to be perfect, you know?

US: Right. This was a really strong part of hers. Yes. Really very special. 

AL: We used to tease her a lot, because she liked just being an ordinary human being. 

US: Right [laughs]. A unique person, and she was so courageous that she stripped the dance of all these stylised movements, right? This was a big thing. And she was a wonderful dancer. But she knew this [didn’t] lead where she wanted to go. She wanted to go immediately into the interior of the body and get in touch by sensing the body, experiencing its innate intelligence, its wisdom, the implicit competence of body, mind and soul.  

AL: Yeah. It was about expression.

US: Yes. And freeing the body from all these tamed [movements] and armour through these styles taught in dance education. But when you let go of all this, the feelings, the emotions will appear and can flow. 

AL: And I think that’s why she encouraged people to come from all walks of life, because I think she found that people who were trained as dancers found it the most difficult to let go of how their bodies had already been trained. And she would encourage them. And I think putting them alongside people like me, who had no training at all, we would learn from each other. And I had all the psychological training, but none of the movement training. So I had to let go of that, of going to my mind first. And I remember her saying to me, “You’ve got a really strong body and really strong emotions and it’s about time you started using them!” And it was the most useful thing that anybody had ever said to me.

US: Yes [laughs]. But when I completed the training, she told us, “Now you have to study the theory and the background of this approach to dance.” When I arrived at the Tamalpa Institute I had no idea what she was doing. But later on I got her message. So after coming home to Germany I did my Master of Arts at Lesley College in dance and studied Humanistic Psychology, especially Gestalt Therapy, which is very much the theoretical basis of the Life/Art Process

AL: Yes, I agree that the poetic writing as part of that psychokinetic process is a really important use of verbal language but not in a cognitive way. So it’s more connected with the imagination. 

US: Yeah. For me it’s a very clear intention to leave the narrative aspect behind and to go into the abstract quality, which I describe in the article. How it works [is] that you bring the movement directly onto the paper. So this creates different drawings than cognitive drawing, or even imagination, [which] has a different quality. But when you go into the movement, then you have the abstract form. And this brings people away from the narrative.

AL: Yes. It can take it somewhere completely new. 

US: Yeah. And it’s not a cognitive interpretation of the process; it’s going beyond logical thinking into another realm of creation. 

AL: Beautiful. Yes, I agree. It’s a lovely way of putting it. And I think that’s what is really interesting about the expressive therapies in general, that they help us to go into the unknown in a safe way. So I think… that most people who have grown up in a Western framework find the ‘unknown’ quite frightening. And yet, if it can become somewhere that’s beautifully surprising, and to be curious about, it creates that possibility of being able to go with the unknown and to improvise. And I think life is an improvisation. And that’s something I think Anna helped me with very much: to be able to improvise and not know where it is going and then… wonderful possibilities of new things arriving and not to be frightened of the unknown. And I think that’s a really important part of therapeutic process: to let go and allow that transformational growth.

US: Right. And how to guide clients into this place is the question. And for me, I always ask the question when I do these trainings, “How can you create safety?”

AL: Exactly.

US: And there are so many tiny things: how you welcome everyone and how you really have an eye on different processes, how you don’t set limits, or set goals. You have to do this or you have to come up with the performance, but really allow the group to find its own process. And this is where the RSVP cycle comes in. 

AL: Yeah. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that? It’s a big subject in itself!

US: The RSVP is what I try to teach in the last section of weekend training: that people develop the experience of co-creativity, that they experience the interconnectedness among people. And they are incredible moments. I ask them, “What is the theme now in the foreground here within the whole group?” They come up with a theme and then they verbally associate words with the theme. They write down words which are chosen and can be transformed into movement. And then they go ahead and make drawings or symbolic drawings of this particular word association to this theme, which they have perhaps chosen as a group, and then these symbols are translated into movement. And from there they create this patchwork of all these different symbols and come to a performance, which is incredible. Because it is very open, it’s not a choreography. It’s really the performance in the very moment, with all the performance consciousness it needs. And there are incredible moments of interconnectedness, different from what they might have planned, at that very moment. It creates something: an experience that happens when everyone is open to connect with each other.

AL: Beautiful, yeah. That’s a lovely example of using that RSVP cycle process to allow a group to create together. And to improvise, within a structure. It creates a container, and that’s what you’re talking about: that safety and, I think, with ritual – the same thing. Somehow without constructing something really deliberately, you create the environment or the circumstance in which people can feel collaborative with each other.

US: Right. And this co-creativity is something you need to learn as a therapist: to be co-creative with your client in this individual session, to really be open. Where does this come from? And sometimes voices come, like in the workshop in Poland where suddenly the whole group was beginning to sing. One person began to sing and I said, “Okay, you can sing.” And then something beautiful developed out of nothing. So you try to pick up whatever is there. Sometimes it’s just a word: “Okay, say words or just exhale and find the colour of your voice and of your breath.” And there are moments happening which are a surprise to myself. It goes beyond my planning, right?

AL: Yeah. It’s ‘going with’...

US: Yeah, ‘going with’.

AL: Yeah. It’s one of those things I remember – was Soto teaching when you were a student?

US: Soto, yeah. 

AL: I always remember his improvisation classes, where basically you’re making a choice. Am I going with and keeping something, or am I letting something go? There’s constant choosing. Where is the impulse taking me? And that affect attunement you’re talking about with the other: what are we both picking up on from each other and what are we letting go of? And what are we choosing, and what are we not choosing?

US: Yeah. And what I always try to do is, I begin very much with the ‘I’. Where are my limits, where’s my space to really create a feeling that I have my own space, I have my own limits – or boundaries? And then going to the ‘you’ – ‘I’ and ‘you’ being the principles of the creative process – and then always coming back to the ‘I’ and then going to the ‘we’. But that’s what Anna points out: that the ‘I’ is always the important part. So what do I take on from the other, and what is mine? What do I assimilate and what don’t I take? Right? And I think this is another idea of where the feeling of and experience of safety comes in, when everyone knows, yes, I do have my own space. And I do have my own feelings. I need a particular space around me, and suddenly something changes, and I take something on from the outside. I integrate it or I say “no”. This is what Soto is doing, and this is a very important part of Gestalt, right? 

AL: Yes. And a very important part of what you were talking about with Daniel Stern: the infant individuating from that symbiotic relationship.

US: Yeah. Not just symbiotic, but – and this is what is questioned anyhow – I’m so amazed about Daniel Stern’s research, that he really found out the abstractness of communication between mother and child in the first months. And this terminology, the abstractness, is what I point out and this is where the narrative aspects really go into the background. And the abstract is the place of the unknowing, so not-knowing. It’s not about finding the meaning as soon as possible but to open the space and to go into, with the abstractness, the implicit and the implicit experience. The immediate experience really guides you into the cognition. 

AL: Yeah, and I’m reminded of what Daria called “aesthetic responding”. As in that therapeutic process where you’re allowing yourself to respond to the other aesthetically. Rather than cognitively or making meaning, you’re just responding. Like you say, not mirroring but what’s coming from yourself…

US: Right, yeah responding, not imitating. 

AL: So is there anything else you really want to talk about from the basis of your article through to what you’re doing now?

US: I think I said most of it. That I am so amazed how much ease develops in the therapeutic process when you leave out all the narrative stories and just go into [the] body and let the body speak. And the transformation, the change which can happen through this process of awareness. Everything gets so easy and so light-hearted, and still has a depth, which is amazing. It’s only the problem that it might be frightening to many in the field of dance therapy, because all the analytical approach to the body is really gone, right? We don’t need it. It’s not necessary. And the interpretation and the diagnosis and all that, you really empower the individual. That’s what I see, and I think this is where the experience of self-empowerment is happening. 

AL: Well, it’s not pathologising. And I think that was a big thing that Shaun McNiff brought into the field – well, he identified it – is that we don’t need to be pathologising people. In this work you’re looking for: What are our resources? What do we have that helps us to transcend what’s wrong? Because we’re all flawed. We all have trauma. We all have a history. We’re all human beings. We have things that aren’t that functional about us. I think what Anna really showed me, in all her flaws, is she still could be creative. She could still do this really innovative work without thinking she had to fix herself up. It’s not a thing about fixing. It’s a thing about what can I do with who I am and developing, growing.

US: Yeah. And being in the very moment and seeing what happens in the very moment. It’s really great to share this with you, and I have the experience that a lot of my colleagues – those who are doing trainings in dance therapy – don’t really get this. It might be frightening even, when you just go away from an analysis and body analysis and Laban theories and all that. It doesn’t go anymore, right? Phenomenlogy is really such a basic philosophy that shifts everything around. You really have to let go of all that you know about psychology, what you know about the development of a human being. And this is a totally new beginning, from my point of view. It’s my feeling and I think I was searching for it. I went through all these different therapeutic processes and approaches, and I always felt, no, this can’t be it. To punch on pillows and to kick your father through the room, it doesn’t really change anything, right?  [Laughs]. That’s not it, but a lot of people are afraid when you come with these statements: you don’t need this. One movement and someone else takes it, and I see something, and I’m touched. That’s where it is, right?

AL: Yeah. And I think one of the tricky things in terms of writing about this or even speaking about it is – and it’s really what you say in your article – that you have to experience it to really understand how it works.

US: Exactly.

AL: So that’s kind of the frustrating, that it can be so simple, apparently simple, but unless you or whoever is involved is completely present, it’s not going to work because it requires that presence and that letting go, that surrender to the process. And that’s not simple to do.

US: Yeah. Right. This is exactly the problem of the whole thing. You have to allow yourself to let go of all that you know about the whole process and really be there. And then once you’re there to guide clients who are traumatised, it takes a long time. It’s not a confrontation though - “I will confront my father” - it’s more feeling, “Okay, what is this? What is happening inside when I think of my father? I feel it here now.” And then you move it and then you make it yours, right?

AL: Yeah. And that’s very important. It’s about what’s here now, rather than what the story was about then. 

US: And that’s what Stern says. Why did psychology always go back into the past instead of starting in the present? I just met another psychologist. She was teaching at the University and she said, “Stern had a lot of problems. A lot of people attacked him.” I didn’t know that. 

AL: No, I didn’t know that. And yes, I think psychology was really built on this idea of going back, and while there can be some value in understanding our past – and I know Anna would really have said this a lot to us – all we can do anything about is what we have now and who we are now.

US: Yeah. Right. Sure.

AL: And I think the other thing that was really profound about the five-part process that they taught, is that those workshops you talk about where people are kicking things or throwing things or catharting all over the place – is that what would be the ‘change’ level of the process they were talking about? But it’s the ‘growth’ stage that they were interested in, what Anna and Daria were interested in. So yes, you can go around and around a million workshops and experience the change within the situation of the change, feeling that release. Yet unless it’s in part of this creative process we’re talking about, where somehow you transform it and make meaning, not cognitive meaning, but meaning in terms of understanding oneself, then that can go into ‘growth’, where it really goes into one’s life and how one lives, that life/art process: that my art, my creativity, helps inform my life as well as my life informing my art. So it’s that thing of how do I take that into my life rather than just be in the workshop and have a big catharsis, and feel a bit better in the moment maybe, but not really have changed anything. 

US: Right. Yeah. So the fifth part, right.

AL: Yeah, the fifth part: ‘growth’.

US: And the performance ideas are very different ones. The distinction between choreography and performance, to have the performance, really be an open process. Of course, you have your ‘scoring’ process. But it’s not a choreography because it’s not predictable what is happening. That’s what Larry Halprin was pointing out, right? But it’s openness of the performance itself. So even in the performance moment, which creates a closure to a longer process, still it’s open to what is happening at the very moment. When I did my mother performance, which you probably did as well, right? The mother performance? 

AL: Oh yes. Yes.

US: I told my partner, “You have to run behind me”. And then I will just go out to the deck and what happened was there I was running and I was falling down, and he was falling on top of me. And this was the turning point. So you don’t get up and say, “I’m sorry, this was not what I planned to do”, but this is it: to go with the very moment. So you can’t run away from your mother was the message, right. It doesn’t work. She is there. [laughs].

AL: She’ll fall on top of you, yeah [laughs].

US: [Laughs].

AL: Yeah. I was actually getting goose bumps when you were telling me, because suddenly my mind went to all my different – my mother, my father, my grandparents - all those ‘enactments’, if you want to call them [that], which might be an easier word for people to understand than ‘performance’ or ‘score’.

They’re like a dramatherapy enactment of a relationship. And you give the other person an idea of the role, but anything can happen in the moment. That helps illuminate for you: “A-ha, that’s it”. That’s my response to this thing. This is my present response to what happened in this enactment. And also I feel we did such a lot of learning when we were given a role in somebody else’s enactment. There was such a learning – particularly if you’re training to be a therapist, where you take on a role for someone. It’s huge, what you learn.

US: It is huge, and at the same time, if you overdo it, if you make it your own then you’re losing it. But at the same time, you can’t just surrender to what’s there. Right? This is a very fine line. Yeah. 

AL: Particularly when we were at Sea Ranch, we would do these big scores that might last for days. But it might have started from a really small task. Do this, go there, do that and then these relationships would all be revealed within what would happen, what would unfold.

US: Yeah, right. I spent a whole day with a blindfold, right next to the ocean, just with closed eyes [laughs]. It was incredible.

AL: I did the same thing, and actually I was in a time in my life where I was wanting to leave a situation, a relationship, and I had no idea what I was going to do next. So I said to someone, “I’m going to blindfold myself and I’m going to walk on the edge of the cliff. Just make sure I don’t fall off. That’s your only job”.

US: No [laughs].

AL: But it gave me the feeling that this is where I am in my life. I need to get comfortable with being close to the edge and not knowing what I’m going to do next. And I have to learn how to tolerate this feeling. It was a really useful thing to do. And I knew he would keep me safe. So it was a thing of trust in myself. 

US: Right. Amazing.

AL: So we had an opportunity with those relationships we’d built up over years to know, “Ah, who’s the person I need to help me do this thing?” You know, give them that role in the score. 

US: Yeah, right.

AL: Or give the whole group a role in my score. 

US: Right. And to really accept even those moments of life which did not work out right, because there’s always learning.

AL: Yeah. Well, I feel we could talk for hours [laughs]. But we probably need to wrap it up because it’s supposed to be a podcast, and no one wants to listen to us reminiscing! 

US: [Laughs].

AL: [Laughs].

US: But I’m so glad to have met you here. It’s wonderful.