Expressive Arts Therapy ‘Architecture’ as Coding ‘Cut Up’ Poems

To follow the thread of my research and allow a coding structure to emerge around the process of ‘aesthetic analysis’, the co-researchers’ resultant intermodal poems were further coded through an intermodal transference process. This initial session was conducted with myself and my expressive arts therapy clinical supervisor, Ellen Levine, using Knill et al.’s (2005) ‘architecture’ of an intermodal EXA session:

1. Filling in where the client talks about the presenting problem.

2. Decentring into the alternative world of arts and imagination.

117 3. Aesthetic analysis, the combining of aesthetic response and aesthetic

responsibility, where client and facilitator stay within the realms of the expressive aesthetic without distancing from or objectifying the art process.

4. Harvesting or using the information gathered in the active art-making phase or decentring in a phenomenological unconscious way. This phase goes back to the issues discussed in the filling-in phase making connections to the decentring phase.

Ellen and I decided to cut up the lines from poems, sit with them and attune to them through a ‘decentring’ into the phenomenology of alternative world experiences held in poetics, art, and play. Decentring is a way of finding themes through a ‘move away from the narrow logic of thinking and acting that marks the helplessness around the “dead end”

situation in question’ (Knill et al., 2005, p.83). Using this ‘decentred’ approach, there is a potential to construct themes from what lay within the text rather than filtered through a pre-structured matrix. In this process, I can find emergent themes through grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss, 2008) held in a phenomenological thematic analysis. I cut up the three poems from the three groups who danced Ivan’s mask ‘G’ and, from them, took one word or phrase from each line. I then added some linking words and arranged them to make a poem:

Playful curiosity is trapped inside fear.

Trust has punched out, to touch, break through, and protect the web of souls.

Ellen Levine (2015) has used EXA decentring architecture in her analysis of play therapy work with children with her husband, Steve. The process Levine (2015) used involved her seeking ways to incorporate the case studies that she had made with children into a book format. What emerges through her art-based research is that she realises a deeper

understanding of the child’s socio-political context and their internal life essence, and

118 clarifies her role in the process as an enabler. My expressive art-based research seeks to access a heuristic understanding of my ASC participants’ internal life essence across the boundaries of language and neural processing that separate our understanding of each other.

Working for a second time through Skype with Ellen Levine, my expressive arts therapy clinical supervisor, we processed the Westcliff, Oxford and Kilkenny groups poems that had emerged from each of these groups’ intermodal moving of Ivan’s mask ‘G’. The application of the way we worked in an intermodal way, using the European Graduate School (EGS) (Knill et al., 2005) model, can be seen in the full transcript in Appendix 17.

I explained to Ellen my quandary about using Burroughs’ and Dadaist Tzara’s (1920) cut up technique (Skerl, 1985, p.438) and how I felt torn between the dominance or total abandonment of structure to allow the reciprocal, experiential and relational to ‘code’ or frame the raw data of the mask danced poems. However, I had a hunch that this was a method that could keep the ‘life of the mask’ or ‘live art’ intact. We decided to work through Knill’s (2005) architecture process and I stated that my intention was to get an essence of what it is like for the person who made the mask. Ellen suggested that we should devise ‘some way that I/she can be helpful to you as a listener/reader’. I would read the three poems and she would write down key words that popped out as resonate attunement, that might be interesting, and words that attract. After I had read the poems, Ellen stated that she would edit the words from this list of words that attract and, from this, she would write a poem. We agreed and the resultant poem follows:

My trapped teeth My trapped teeth Scary and scared

Sending sparkly rays of aliveness Going step by step

Gently into The soft nothing.

119 The next phase of the intermodal process was the aesthetic analysis. To begin with Ellen said: ‘We know what we did... you read poems to me, I wrote words from each poem, and then I made a poem of the words. I was very active but we were kind of like doing it together... because I was taking the outside. What are your feeling?’ I explained that I felt sad and also gagged, not sad in a tearful way, but a kind of resignation of my ‘gagging’ of being silenced. Moving into the ‘harvesting’ phase, Ellen suggested that we come up with two titles: one for the process and the other a title for the whole work we did. I came up with ‘poetic analysis’ for the process and ‘biting the softness’ for the poem. Further

‘harvesting’ revealed that the work we did was not just a poem and could give a message that would inform. The message became ‘Follow your heart gut’, which I read as trusting sensate intuition.

Both the cut up and the intermodal poems have parallels in feelings of being trapped and moving out through breaking through or gently stepping, of an inner and outer perception.

I see parallels in the words:

‘The web of souls’ and ‘the soft nothing’,

‘The playful curiosity’ and ‘sparkly rays of aliveness’,

‘Trapped inside fear’ and ‘trapped teeth’.

‘Biting the softness’

‘My trapped teeth My trapped teeth Scary and scared

Sending sparkly rays of aliveness Going step by step

Gently into The soft nothing’

‘Playful curiosity is trapped inside fear.

Trust has punched out, to touch, break through, and protect the web of souls.’

120 3.10 Tankas Research and embodied interpretation

Later, after my work with Ellen Levine, I realised that we were intuitively working very closely to what Prendergast (2009) and Faulkner (2009) suggest: poetry as research tools, through poetic inquiry and as a methodology of poetry as method. Faulkner (2009, p.24) states that ‘Lyric poetry is always ethnographic – capturing those experiences in such a way that others can experience and feel them.’ Faulkner (2009, p. 27) describes the term

‘research tankas’ as a Japanese poetic form and potential for coding or framing the

ethnography held in the original lyric poem, where a second and subsequent authors ‘used the poems to create research tankas – noting initial impressions – exploring dichotomies – and a version of grounded theory analysis’. This is something that Ellen and I

unintentionally did through Knill et al.’s (2005) aesthetic analysis and harvesting.

As well as the ASC-made masks, and my attunement throughout the whole process, my unconscious psyche is the link that is consistent within all of this expressive art-based research, witnessing the entire process from ASC mask making to intermodal poetry. This experience is held in an unbiased and embodied unconscious state and is beyond

reification, as I cannot process or bias the embodied unconscious experience until it is revealed into the conscious mind. This transference of the original ASC participant art making that I hold in my psyche can only be realised through further intermodal expressive arts processing, like the aforementioned architecture of an EXA session as practised with Ellen Levine.

Something that seemed to better fit my coding requirements was the concept of Galvin and Todres in Prendergast’s (2009, p.308) embodied interpretation as a

‘phenomenological descriptive analysis of transcribed text’. They state that, by moving between their embodied sense and the meanings held in texts as potentials for embodied sensate and intermodal transference, ‘It is the body based hermeneutics that goes back and forth between language and the felt sense of the text conveyed in our bodies’ (Galvin and Todres, in Prendergast, 2009, p.308). This process is emergent and requires a

phenomenological and embodied immersion into the live art of the text. It is not analysed through a systematic grouping exercise in objective classification into preordained

121 meanings of text, as thematic textual analysis might. Galvin and Todres in, Prendergast (2009, p. 309), speak of their intention through embodied interpretation to: ‘Represent that aliveness’ that is held in this project as the intermodal poem, ‘in ways that don’t kill it’

and that ‘connect to people in a heartfelt way’ that awakens in the reader ‘the sense of it as it lives’.