1st Edition
Creative Bodies in Therapy, Performance and Community Research and Practice that Brings us Home
Creative Bodies in Therapy, Performance and Community champions several diverse and innovative approaches in the professional engagement with the creative body as a catalyst for change in therapy, education, somatics and performance.
With contributors from the wide-ranging fields of performance and visual arts, psychotherapy, dance and somatics, this book articulates practice-based experiences in a creative language. The readers are invited to move from the process of reading, into the experience of being in and making sense of the world through a moving body. The book meanders purposefully through practice-led embodied approaches in research that generate new knowledge, methodological frameworks that have emerged in response to the needs of different contexts, as well as offerring a window on first-hand experience as practice.
The book will appeal to a wide range of practitioners and trainees in Dance Movement Psychotherapy, arts therapies, counselling and psychotherapy, somatics, community practice and performance.
Table of contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- List of contributors
- Foreword: Dr Jill Westwood
Chapter 1
Arriving, becoming and arriving again
Caroline Frizell and Marina Rova
Chapter 2
Check- in, please! Exploring movement check-ins as a tool for embodied psychotherapeutic practice
Heidrun Panhofer
Chapter 3
Arts based research and self-reflexive autobiographical performance
Ditty Dokter
Chapter 4
Kinaesthetic entanglements and creative immersion in embodied performance
Marina Rova
Chapter 5
The cat, the foal and other meetings that make a difference: posthuman research that re-animates our responsiveness to knowing and becoming
Caroline Frizell
Chapter 6
Offerings tells the stories of our lives in movement
Sarah Black – Frizell and Angela Pierre Louis
Chapter 7
Lives transformed through dance. The art of dance as a catalyst for personal transformation
Ellen Steinmuller
Chapter 8
Breath, Belly and Back. Dropping Into Body as Ground
Paul Beaumont
Chapter 9
‘Is that yoga or are you just making it up?’
Helen Poynor
Chapter 10
Being Seen and Seeing Self: framing embodiment
Claire Burrell
Chapter 11
Finding my way home: an embodied journey to building an inclusive dance community
Juliet Diener
Chapter 12
Dancing in the Kitchen: Using Creativity and Embodiment to Promote a Decolonising Approach to Psychotherapy
Archana Ballal
Chapter 13
Sing your way home: Designing a creative group intervention in the women’s prison as a Dance Movement Therapist in Singapore
Agnes Law
Chapter 14
Borderlands: Exploring creativity as a practice of liminality in the arts therapies
Marina Rova and Marrianne Behm
Chapter 15
Indominus Rex; developing mentalisation with offenders through externalisation and creativity in a Dance Movement Psychotherapy Group
Dawn Batcup
Chapter 16
Dancing with Stephen. Working with Profound and Complex Needs
Goretti Barjacoba-Souto
Chapter 17
The Matriarch and the Mollusc
Caroline Frizell and Helen Poynor
Chapter 18
Happening upon a Cobweb
Caroline Frizell and Marina Rova
Index
Biography
Caroline Frizell, PhD, is senior lecturer and researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as therapist and supervisor working indoors and out. She is committed to posthuman, eco-feminist perspectives, working at the intersections of Dance Movement Psychotherapy, ecopsychotherapy and critical disability studies.
Marina Rova, PhD, is programme convenor, lecturer and researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London and co-founder of Arts Minded CIC. Her work is nourished by embodied and relational approaches to knowing and being-in-the-world and led by a curiosity about the developmental, existential and socio-political contexts that shape our narratives.
‘Frizell and Rova’s book is fizzing with ideas, thoughts and bodies of all kinds that continually touch, move and morph into new assemblages. The book is unsettling – in the best sense of the word: questioning, probing and deconstructing established binaries and norms, and in the process revealing new vistas of humanity’s capacity for compassion, connection and depth. Reading this book was a stirring experience for me, not dissimilar to that of reading David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous, which is high praise indeed.’ - Dr Farhad Dalal, psychotherapist, group analyst and author, UK
‘Caroline Frizell and Marina Rove have brought together an inspiring collection of voices that weave a picture of contemporary embodied research and practice as creatively, politically, critically and evocatively alive and kicking. As co-editors, authors and co-authors of chapters, they bring a spirit of spontaneity, inclusiveness, warmth and humour to a complex and rigorous intersectional enquiry. The book spans a range of research, theoretical and practical approaches to creative, movement, dance and community psychotherapy, its contributors representing and working with a truly diverse set of people and contexts. This anthology walks its talk or rather dances it….as the construction of the book, its layers, and the dialogue within and between each chapter, shimmer and resonate. Each chapter takes us through steps of embodied knowing towards transformation that goes beyond the personal and into wider social change.’ - Roz Carroll, psychotherapist, trainer and author, UK
‘Self-reflective, experimental and full of warmth, this collaborative book is a welcome example of creative non-fiction that deepens the project of integrating the embodied and the relational.’ - Jane Ryan, Founder and Creative Director of Confer, UK
