Tripura Kashyap, founder-director of Apoorva Dance Theatre in Bangalore and one of the pioneers of Creative Movement Therapy in India writes about how Dance and Movement Therapy helped Sheela, a 12-year-old girl on the Autism Spectrum in multiple ways. Read on:
Movement and dance have the power to reach out to anyone. Dance Therapy cuts across socio-cultural-linguistic divides and impacts even those who we think are unreachable, living in their own realities. Sheela* is one such person that I had the pleasure of working with. She is on the autism spectrum, and she came to me with quite a few issues like lack of attention span, sudden spurts of violence, lack of eye contact and imitation skills as well as a sense of loneliness. We worked through all these issues and after several months of working together we glimpsed a light across the dark tunnel. She finally walked away with a sense of self-awareness and an ability to relate to her family and friends in a much more positive manner.
Individual sessions with Sheela
Sheela, a twelve- year-old girl with autism studied in a special school and could not cope with most of the academic subjects being taught. Her social skills were poor - she had rejected attempts by her peers who tried to make friends with her in class. Her family consisted of her parents and younger sister. She was brought for individual dance therapy sessions because she found it difficult to function in any kind of a group. For over a year and a half we met thrice a week for forty-five minute sessions.
The Initial Days with Sheela
In the preliminary sessions, we tested each other out. She observed me while I assessed her strengths and problem areas through movement evaluation. I also used this time to focus on building a relationship with her. After a few sessions, she began to refer to me as her ‘friend’. During the first few sessions, she would shift between moving and responding with high energy to being immobile and oblivious to what we were doing. She displayed repetitive movements of fluttering her fingers and flicking them outwards whenever agitated or restless.
Visually these gestures appeared bizarre, similar perhaps to the movements of a person wanting to be desperately understood in a strange land. Initially, her ability to concentrate on any activity was limited to two minutes after which she would run to the window and gaze outside. Her progress was erratic, from being able to show me everything that was done in the previous sessions to holding a self-absorbed attitude, refusing to pay attention. Due to poor eye contact, and lack of concentration, she continuously delayed the imitation of body preparatory exercises.
For example when I rotated my elbows, she would still be rotating her arms that had already been done. She needed visual cues and physical prompts to change her movements from one to another. Because certain body parts such as her torso, neck and shoulders were stiff, she found it difficult to complete a movement pattern. When I showed her a big circle with my arm she did an incomplete version of the movement by doing just a semicircle. I therefore worked only with body preparatory exercises in the first few sessions to help her move her body with ease.
Emotional Outbursts
Her emotional expression was unpredictable. She would cry, laugh or become surprised and angry all within the span of a session. A simple rhythmic activity consisting of stamping feet and snapping fingers to a four- beat rhythm would bring tears to her eyes because she could not do it. All of a sudden, there would be a burst of laughter at nothing in particular. Feelings of frustration or anger were usually manifested in her biting or scratching herself. What was interesting was that the moment I asked her ‘Why is Sheela pinching herself?’ she would reply to me with the same question but would stop pinching herself.
Warm Up Exercises
After the warm-up routine, we would do body awareness games in which new movements like stretching upwards, running, twisting the body or walking backwards were included. Simultaneously, she had to verbalize what she was doing. For example, she had to say ‘my hands are swinging side to side’ while she was doing it. This exercise helped her become aware of what she was doing. While incorporating these new movement patterns, her repetitive movements like fluttering and flicking her fingers also considerably reduced. After nearly a month, she also began responding instantly to contrasts and quick changes in movement. For example, I would call out movements one after another such as bend, run, stop, walk, stand on one leg or jump, etc. As we went through this activity several times with different movements each time, her body reflexes improved and she performed the actions without too much of a pause.
Use of Props
As we devised movement games with a pair of dandia sticks, she went in to raptures but also displayed spurts of violence by hitting the sticks angrily on the wall or throwing them in different directions. We played a game in which we would say ‘Sheela is sad’ or ‘Sheela is happy’ and hit the sticks to the floor in different ways expressing these feelings. Apart from using the sticks to express what she felt, we also devised rhythm and partnership games. We made up movement phrases with the sticks being hit in the air, down on the floor, to the sides or in front. This is when she seemed most attentive perhaps because she felt we were doing a dance together. Gradually as her eye-hand coordination improved, she became gentler with the sticks and used them in a focused manner.
In several sessions, though, she did not pay attention to some movement activities, but she would repeat everything we did in detail at home for her parents. In fact, in the later sessions, she wanted to dance with her family in the sessions. There seemed an extra surge of energy and enthusiasm in her when her parents and younger sister joined us. She became surprisingly gentle towards her sister who had often been the butt of her violence at home. After nearly three months, she began to feel comfortable and enjoyed being in a small group consisting only of her family and myself.
Trust & Rapport
It was the trust, rapport and contact between us that got her to respond in such a concentrated manner to these sessions. After she settled down, she would begin to sway or swing to any music that was playing and be completely drawn in to the experience. I would see a look of pleasure on her face with every movement she made. She hardly ever ran to the window any more during the sessions!
She began to move through all the movement activities with the ease and confidence of a normal twelve year old. Though the idea was not to teach her to perform a dance, she eventually wanted to group the movements we did together in a sequence. Towards the end of six months, she began to need less physical help in performing movement tasks and progressed to responding appropriately to verbal instructions.
Tripura Kashyap studied Dance therapy at the Hancock Center, Wisconsin, USA and also received classical dance training at Kalakshetra, Chennai as well as Jazz, Ballet, Modern dance, choreography and dance theatre lessons at the American Dance Festival, N. Carolina. Tripura has received fellowships from the Ashoka International Foundation and the Indian Ministry of Culture for her innovative work in dance therapy and contemporary dance.
*Name changed
