BUSHY THEATER: A Time to Dance, At Home on Earth, Norma Canner

Norma G. Canner

In the Native American culture, man’s sense of wholeness is based on his continual communion with nature and the supernatural. In the words of the Lakota Medicine Man Black Elk, "peace...comes within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers." (Heinberg, p. 37)

In Western culture, our emphasis instead is on overcoming natural forces to serve our own purposes and on relying on technology to solve problems.

As dancers and dance therapists, we employ dance as a way of getting back to our relationship with the universe; as a way of healing and empowering the people with whom we work. Dance arises from our need to identify with creative forces in ourselves and in the cosmos. Dancing intensifies our awareness for our being and is composed of our profoundest impulses and emotions. In dance we express our own powers, and the powers that connect us to the world.

Alienation from Our Planet-Alienation From Ourselves

This paper arises from my concern regarding the social, political, and planetary problems we are experiencing, and how our attitudes toward nature and our planet are causing both individual and collective pain. Hopefully it will provide some insight for dance therapists working the field of mental health.

I will first look at some of the cultural factors that influence us. American society is diverse, with values based on many ethnic groups, races, religions, and economic conditions. However, it has primarily been the upper middle class, white male culture that has defined and dominated social values. Unfortunately, this culture encourages division - based on gender, race, economic status, social institutions, professional hierarchies, power, and aggression. One’s worth is judged by one’s possessions and achievements. Individualism is prized above all else. We are taught that we are separate from the earth.

Consider the consequences. We are unable to live side by side with the rivers, the sea, the air, the forest, and the animals. We are destroying these life-giving resources of the earth. We need to learn from the Native Americans. We need to be stewards; to care for the earth, protect it, and feel the pain of violation.

We are unable to live side by side with each other. We long for a sense of community, but lack the tools to create it. In Living in Two Worlds, M. Vera Buhrmann (1984) describes how some white South Africans grew up with the sounds of African singing and drumming in their ears at night, and how it stirred feelings of mystery, fear avoidance. "Leave it alone," they were told, and so for a long time they knew little or nothing about it. They failed to accept a culture different from their own. They failed to understand the purpose of using singing, dancing and drumming as a method of healing—something we as dance therapist are trying to recapture.-

We have not only separated ourselves from the earth and one another, we have separated ourselves from ourselves. In South Africa, a Zulu medical practitioner said, "Whites have failed to see that in Africa a human being is an entity...not divided up into various sections such as the physical body, the soul and the spirit. When a Zulu is sick it is the whole man that is sick..." (Buhrmann, 1984, p. 32).

We need to address these forms of cultural blindness if we are to alleviate individual suffering and feelings of alienation. Psychologist Mary Watkins (1991) states:

The unconscious that psychotherapy must unearth, if it is not to be irrelevant to much of the suffering we are asked to address, is not simply the personal unconscious, but the cultural unconscious. It is not just the unconscious of the patient over there, apart from us, but our own cultural unconscious that has educated us from birth, and that is at work in the professionalization we have endured. It is the unconscious that is at work in theories we have learned and contributed to. If the psychotherapy cannot work at the level of the cultural unconscious, it is but one more part of the socialization process, a part that offers a more comfortable conformity, rather than the advent of liberation and transformation (p. 32).

Nancy Beardall, a teacher and dance therapist, has worked in the public schools in Newton, Massachusetts for 13 years. Serving as a consultant to parents, teachers, and students, Beardall travels around the schools teaching body awareness and expression, and principles of sensory-motor development. Her techniques help diagnose children’s perceptual-motor problems, and also serve as tools to foster physical and emotional development among disabled and non-disabled children alike.

Junior high school students, for example, create dances as a part of problem-solving, expressing their ideas and learning to work together. They make video tapes of their work so that they can learn by observing themselves. Sometimes they perform their dances for parents and the school community.

Beardall’s work has had a powerful, positive and preventive influence on children in the school system. It stimulates them intellectually, fosters interaction with others, reinforces positive self-image, promotes body awareness and relaxation, and provides an outlet for emotional and creative expression. She has built a strong base of support for a dance/movement program in the schools, and has secured local and national funding. Her model can be used to develop similar programs in schools throughout the country.

Children often recognize their connectedness to all things better than the most sophisticated adult. A nine-year-old girl from El Paso, Texas expressed her earth-mindedness in a poem that Ann Landers published in her column in 1991:

People have cut down the trees,

which are my lungs.

They have polluted the air,

which is my brain.

They have polluted the streams,

which are my blood vessels.

They have polluted my oceans, which are the

chambers of my heart.

My wrath has gotten gigantic.

My wrath is hurricanes and tornadoes.

I am the ill earth.

If people trash me,

I will die, and so will they (May, 1991).

Perhaps if we can begin to feel the earth as an integral part of ourselves we can learn to live with less abuse to one another and to our most sacred and only home, planet earth.

The questions are many, and our challenges are great. But hopefully, as the poet Rilke advises us, we will "love the questions and perhaps then we may live into the answers."