Editorial

编者按

Clive Holmwood, Rebecca Zarate, Vivien Marcow Speiser, Michal Lev and Liwen Ma

In this edition of the CAET Journal, the singular idea that binds all the articles together is embodiment—the idea that our feelings reside in our bodies, at times imperceptibly, waiting to be listened to. As Liwen Ma reminds us in the fifth article, our bodies hold “perception, experience, expression, evaluation, and regulation of emotions.” Our bodies can be seen not only as a metaphor for our feelings and emotions, but also how our bodies literally hold such feelings and emotions, and as importantly need to be heard. This simple but basic understanding is something that is needed now more than ever.

We are struck, post-pandemic, by multiple wars raging in Europe, the Middle East, and other parts of the world. The extreme stress, trauma, and horror of these events, unfolding mostly to innocent people, on all sides, cannot go unmentioned. Now more than ever, our ability to listen to what our bodies tell us through drama, dance, music, or the movement of a pencil across paper is needed. We hope, in a small way, that those people in power and influence across the world will take heed of the suggestions in our articles in this Winter 2023 edition. The body needs to be heard and listened to and acted upon to create positive peaceful and productive futures.

We begin, aptly, with Hilda Wengrower’s article, which considers drama-based work carried out in schools with girls from refugee families and the varying metaphors their dramatic work represented for them. This kind of work will be needed more than ever with the global movement of children and families often forced to flee due to war and other disasters—with a reminder that “researching with children” rather than “researching children” helps balance the potential of power dynamics, something children of immigrants will already hold a sense of.

In our second article, Steve Harvey et al. reflects on how they coped during the pandemic online using dance, art, music, poetry, and storytelling, allowing them to “to gain an understanding of subjective experience, emotional climate, and how this changed over the time of the crises” and reminding us of the human capacity and strength to adapt and change to spiraling circumstances. Next, Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau takes us to the very particular world of a psychiatric day center in France, where the idea of institutional psychotherapy from the 1970s has been developed into music and video clubs to support psychiatric patients, offering a modern twist on what some might consider outdated notions of power in the institution, freeing individuals to be more open.

Our fourth offering from Lucy Draper Clark allows us to consider African wisdom tradition and healing practices as a way of considering the gap between Eastern meditation and Western cognitive therapeutic practices. Centered on a research project while on retreat in South Africa and working with a number of healers and practitioners, ideas such as ubuntu, roughly translated as the philosophy of sensitivity and caring for others, are explored—again, something required now more than ever.

Liwen Ma from Beijing Normal University follows next with a practical development of her integral drama-based pedagogy using drawing and images within a drama context. She gives an example of a child who uses drawings to project himself into various scenes and using those drawn images as a way of telling his own story—showing that our embodied experiences can extend through our fingertips and can project into a two-dimensional image as well as three-dimensional movements.

Our next article, “Chakra Awareness through Dance and Movement Therapy” by Tripura Kashyap and colleagues, continues this theme of extending movement in, through, and out of the body. Kashyap et al. introduce us to a novel approach that combines modern dance movement therapy with the traditional and ancient uses of the Indian chakra system. This offers the potential to “cultivate stability, inner strength, and a heightened self-awareness” within the body.

Our penultimate article visits South Africa where Vivien Speiser considers “Voices from the Field: Investigating the Emergent Form of an Indigenous Dance Movement Therapy Training Program in South Africa.” The article sets the scene by considering some of the pioneers who have helped shape the dance movement therapy movement in South Africa. It also explores the author’s Fulbright Senior Scholar assignment in Johannesburgh from early 2020 to her subsequent return in 2023 in initiating support to set up the first academic trainings in dance movement therapy in South Africa.

Our final article continues the dance movement theme by considering some of the early international pioneers of the dance movement therapy movement. Tony Zhou and Vivien Speiser offer us a selection of discussions from the WAEF 2023 “World Arts and Embodiment Forum,” a historical overview of some of the founders of the profession from Europe, Africa, and the Far East, reminding us of the importance of the development of global connections, ancestry, and cultures.

This edition is completed with Giselle Ruzany’s review of Lucy Draper’s book, A Journey Book: The Compassionate Activist Transforming the World from Within. Reflecting on different forms of activism, the author offers ideas and practices from a variety of perspectives, including Buddhist philosophy and evolutionary psychology based on the author’s experiences stemming from such international disasters as COVID-19 and the tsunami in Thailand in 2004.

This journal edition offers us a timely reminder of the importance of listening to and responding to our own bodies and how using the tacit knowledge our bodies hold allows us to understand ourselves and our place in the world as it is currently and as we look forward to the hope of a peaceful future.