Athena, being autistic and Dance Movement Therapy - and how these connected in Athens on International Autism Awareness Day 2024

Over the past few years, I have put out postings on - and for - international autism day/week/month: sometimes whole series of postings. Here is a sample one. I have done this while seeking to convey that autism - a way of being - is not just about a specific period of time. It's always. But I have also noted that this time in March-April allows an opportunity to reflect and share. 

On this year's Autism Day, I was in Athens. I should perhaps write a posting on this visit as it had a deep impact on me, including as I sat - for probably two hours - in my special place on the slopes of Mount Lykavittos as the light went down over the city.

On Mount Lykavittos - the rock in Athens dropped by Athena as the ancient local myth went

I was in Athens to give a paper at the Swedish Institute at Athens' ancient religion seminar on Athena as a dancer. This paper was extending research I've done over some years - well decades - into Athena by looking at dance and other types movement connected with this deity. 

Title slide of my presentation at the Swedish Institute - when I write up the paper, the content of the images should become apparent

What I had found as I was preparing the paper - as I had when I gave an earlier version at a conference in Coimbra last year - was just how far my research has been informed by what I have been doing on autism and classical myth. 

On the one hand, this is because everything I do is shaped by a neurodivergent way of looking at ancient evidence, as I have been increasingly realising over the years. 

It is also because of the paper's specific content. For what I proposed was an approach to ancient dance that is informed by Dance Movement Theory. 

This is a theory - and practice - that can be used by, and with, anyone whether neurodivergent or neurtypical. However, as with Dramatherapy (which I've written about previously on this blog, beginning here) there is particular potential for connecting with autism: for example, as a means for autistic people to explore autistic minds and bodies, and to open up new ways to envisage the body in space and how movement and cognition correlate. 

Slide from my presentation in Athens on Dance Movement Therapy as defined by the Association for Dance Movement Psychotherapy UK

As I was giving the paper, I stressed that I was very much just getting going with my research. I wondered, too, whether, as someone who is very much not qualified in Dance Movement Therapy, I should be doing anything more than expressing my curiosity about what it entails. 

Then something happened in the question time straight after the paper that made me think again.

I often find transitioning from a paper I've delivered to the discussion hard - I have given my all. I am exhausted. Answering specific questions can be a challenge. But one of the questions this time - from someone present online (this was a hybrid session) - turned out to be from someone whose connections with the topic floored me: in a good way.

For one thing, she explained that she studied at Roehampton, the university where I am now an emeritus professor and whose artefacts have been key to my autism work culminating to date here. More than this, she shared that she is a Dance Movement Therapist. There is more still: she explained that is a member of a Non Profit Organisation called the Athena Foundation.

So there was me arguing for Athena to be explored in relation to Dance Movement Therapy when Dance Movement Therapists already see the potential of Athena to encapsulate the therapy.

I am hoping that we will be able to connect! Watch this space: hopefully...

Soon I'll share other experiences during Autism Month, including a SUPERB paper I zoomed into by Cora Beth Fraser on autism, classics and labyrinths last week...

Autism Acceptance Week – Thursday… ‘What Isadora Duncan knew: Athena as Dance Movement Therapist in ancient Greek art’

Abraham Walkowitz, Isadora Duncan #29, c. 1915.
Water and ink over graphite, Brooklyn Museum 39.174,
retrieved from Wikimedia Commons

A formative period for me while I was very much in the formative stages of being interested in connecting autism and classical myth was when I took a week-long dramatherapy course run by the Arts Therapies team at Roehampton.

It was an experience that went differently than I had expected. I had imagined us sitting in rows making notes from sessions led by the tutor. In fact, however, to introduce us to dramatherapy, we were all immersed in it as though we were clients. It was a deeply personal, sometimes difficult and transformative time.

Then, about a year later, I signed up for another course run by the same team on autistic bodies and movement. I was excited and was feeling some anxiety too about what would happen – but what happened was that the course was cancelled. So I never got to know.

Since then, however, movement and autism has been something I have been wanting to find out more about. And already, I have seen that it is when people copy the gestures of Hercules, Pleasure and Hard Work - on the panel that is key to the autism activities I have developed so far - that they move to a deeper level of engagement.

Carter Workshop, Chimneypiece panel depicting Hercules tasked
with choosing between Pleasure and Hard Work, Adam Room, Grove House,
Roehampton. Photo by Marina Arcady

I am soon going to be writing a paper that might enable me to gain an understanding of some of what might be involved. I am going to be spending several days in Coimbra in Portugal in July, participating in the Celtic Classics Conference. The panel I’ll be part of is ‘Religious Movement in Ancient Mediterranean Art’, convened by two inspirational ancient religion and art scholars Ellie Mackin Roberts and Tyler Jo Smith. What prompted me to offer a paper was especially one of the features in the Call for Papers which was that ritualised movement would connect participants and the deities being worshipped. Reading this, I wondered what could be brought into play – pun not intended, but I can’t think of a better way to put it… - when it is the god who is dancing.

I proposed a paper that employs Dance Movement Theory to examine the role of dace when on particular ancient deity, Athena, is being depicted or imagined as a dancer.

Athena emerging from the of Zeus, Attic black-figure belly amphora, c. 550-525 BCE 
belly amphora, now in the Louvre, Paris F 32. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons

Here is the paper I proposed: 

What Isadora Duncan knew: Athena as Dance Movement Therapist in ancient Greek art

As noted in the Call for Papers, ritualised movement connects participants and the divinities being worshipped. But what about when it is the divinity that dances? Employing Dance/Movement Theory – where a client and a therapist engage in an empathetic process to facilitate the physical, emotional, social and cognitive integration of the individual – this paper will explore the significance of dance in relation to Athena. This is a deity whose dancing challenges prevailing assumptions about this god as a deity of ‘mind’ whose very theonym is, indeed, derived from ‘mind of god’ in Plato’s Kratylos. But, as this paper explores, there is already the ‘other name’, Pallas, derived in the same dialogue from frenzied, frantic pulsations. 

The paper will explore how Athena enacts a divine movement suggesting an instance of what Isadora Duncan knew: that ‘dance is the movement of the universe concentrated in an individual’, above all when Athena is depicted emerging from the head – the mind indeed – of another making furious, violent movements. The paper will start with images of Athena dancing herself into being. It will then turn to depictions of a frantically moving Athena at the Gigantomachy. Finally it will explore images of worshippers dancing like – or, better, as – the deity, suggesting a reconfiguration of space and time where the act of worship is creating the god, and where the god (therapist) and worshipper (client) are joined in an intensely empathetic creative moment.

Writing this posting has helped me to feel ready to get started – as has what I was writing about in the chapter draft of the book I mentioned yesterday. I was looking, among other things, at the play the Lysistrata, where the women of Athens go on sex strike and occupy the Akropolis – the home of Athena’s key sanctuary in the city. The play ends with a dance of joy where the final of a series of deities to be evoked to conclude the performance is… Athena.

More planned tomorrow...

How to liberate Hercules (resource pack introduction part 2)

In the Iliad (book 8 lines 360-9), Athena complains to Zeus about the number of times she spent saving Herakles from some disaster or other. In this posting, I am going to continue my exploration, begun in my previous posting, into rescuing this figure (mostly Hercules in what will follow). The rescuing in question will concern saving – perhaps liberating – the hero from the elitism that is so often invoked in postclassical receptions of classical mythology. I might even be moving between scholarship and activism in doing this: I have received some supportive feedback on the previous posting, including from Liz Hale, another member of the Our Mythical Childhood team, commenting that such an attempt at rescuing Hercules constitutes ‘not just pioneering work, but activism too.’

My previous posting concluded with the observation that another hero, Odysseus, can be rescued from any elitist associations. I then asked, ‘Can Hercules?.’ I continued: ‘In a sense, it is harder to rescue this particular hero. In another sense, it is significantly easier – so much so that even a representation in a room in a gentleman’s villa can be made accessible to a wide audience – a more diverse audience that those for whom it was created.’ Here I begin to attempt such a rescue.

The story of the reception of Hercules is very much the story of high culture and of elitism. Hercules has been the subject of many paintings, such as Caracci’s Ercoleguidato dalla Virtù, illustrated at the head of this posting. Episodes from the life of Hercules have figured in works of classical music. What is more, if we turn to the kinds of individuals who have received Hercules, the elitist associations appear compounded. 

This is a tradition that has been evident over the centuries of postclassical reception – but it is a tendency that begins in antiquity, at least with Alexander the Great, as depicted on the coin illustrated here. It might, possibly, be traced further back, to the Athenian tyranny of the sixth century BCE. Alexander the Great did not just draw on imagery of Hercules: he actually dressed as the hero/god. So, too, did the Roman notables Mark Antony and, later, Commodus. Then, after antiquity, a series of leaders had themselves cast as a modern Hercules, including Charlemagne, Richelieu and Napoleon. In the twentieth century, this was continued with Mussolini.[1] Moving into the current century, Vladimir Putin was represented performing the twelve labours of Hercules at an exhibition in Moscow in 2014.

This brings up to date a tendency that has been evident at least since the fourth century BCE. And what it points to is Hercules as one whose superhuman abilities raise him far above ordinary mortals. Hercules is one who can capture or kill monsters and who can carry out wonderful feats of strength. What is more – and this is something that might be suggested in the various examples of notable leaders representing themselves as Hercules – Hercules does not just possess a strength that exceeds that of ordinary people. Rather, it is where he gets this strength from that also places him above the rest of us, for it is god-given. And, what is more, gods intervene in his life – to aid him or to frustrate him. Athena, as noted earlier in this posting – and possibly intimated in Caracci’s Virtue – is one such deity. As Hercules carries out his adventures, he does so on a level that exceeds anything that can relates to the possibilities of ordinary mortals. By being equated with Hercules, the list of notables mentioned above are cast as superior to their country-people.

There were times when their audacity in casting themselves as Hercules was turned against them. For example, Mark Antony’s opponents engaged with Antony at his own game and likely outplayed him, by saying that Antony was indeed like Hercules, but rather than embodying his virtues what he showed were the flaws of the hero (reference in progress!). However, this only reinforces the elitism at play here: for Hercules is still being used as a model for a leader. It is just that, rather than being imbued with the qualities of good leadership, it is as a bad leader that the hero is being received.

Hercules, then, has been received as one superior to others. This has its roots in the classical past and it has continued through the ages and into our own age. However, it is possible to rescue the hero from his associations with leaders – good or bad – while, also, acknowledging that with his extraordinary qualities, Hercules is likely to remain a superior figure – a fantasy figure. This rescuing has been underway for some time and it is a rescuing that has been effected at least as well as that of Odysseus; indeed, the rescuing of Hercules is likely more advanced than that of Odysseus. For Hercules has been repeatedly received in popular culture. There have been several films of Hercules for instance and it is

one of these, Disney's Hercules that has opened up the classical world to a new generation – so much so that, in my experience and that of some of my colleagues, it is that that is providing a pivotal moment for those who, as young adults, go on to study classical subjects at university.

Above all, there is a particular episode from the life of Hercules that has particular value in this regard. It is an episode that is at least as valuable in this respect as the episodes from the life of Odysseus that Grove and Park (see my previous posting) draw from. This is because, for all that Odysseus is read as an everyman figure, this particular Herculean episode has even greater appeal, one that can cut through class or gender. Hercules is, here an ‘everyman’ figure – and an ‘everyhuman’ or ‘everywoman’ as well. This appeal also extends beyond ability or disability.

It is this episode that will be at the centre of the first set of resources that I am developing, with a view to opening up classical myth to autistic users who may, in some cases, lack access to a traditional education.

This episode in question has kept cropping up over the past year or so on this blog – and so some readers might be very aware of what is coming next. But I’ll stop here all the same, and in the next posting I shall turn to this episode. In this next posting, I shall provide the fullest discussion of it to date on this blog.

---

[1] The appropriation of Hercules by various notables through the ages is well explored in Alastair Blanshard’s Hercules: A Heroic Life (Granta 2005) and in Emma Stafford’s Herakles (Routledge 2012).

Autism, Asperger Syndrome, Perseus and Athena

Inspired by emails that I've received just this week from two separate teachers working with autistic children, I have been revisiting an an article I wrote for the 2009 Bulletin of the Council of University Classics Departments setting out what I then saw as the rationale fuelling my work.
 
The remainder of this posting will take the form of a very slightly updated version of that article not least as the journal is temporarily unavailable in its electronic format.  Once it becomes available electronically again, I shall give details of the url.  I also plan, in a subsequent posting, to discuss the image that I have chosen to head this posting: The Baleful Head that Perseus, as represented by Burne-Jones, sees yet fails to become subsumed by.

I began with some general comments on Asperger Syndrome, the autistic spectrum condition on which I was then envisaging focusing.  I am now thinking that a more 'general' autistic focus would be preferable, a development on which I shall report soon.  Anyway, I made these comments with a caveat that they were generalised comments that reflected how little is yet known about the condition in spite of progress in understanding, diagnosis and treatment over recent years (see Frith, 2003; Frith, 2008). Asperger Syndrome is, I stated, an autistic spectrum condition, more commonly diagnosed in males than females, which can result in often subtle differences in aspects of social behaviour, communication and application of mental flexibility (e.g. Brown and Miller, 2004; Martin, 2008). Each person with Asperger Syndrome will have particular needs and challenges. People with Asperger Syndrome may have particular strengths, which can be harnessed when they are given the right support, which include attention to detail, a methodical approach, accuracy, reliability and good motivation.

I noted in the article that I tried out my initial hypothesis—that classical mythology might provide a fresh means of supporting people with Asperger Syndrome—on several colleagues, all of whom thought the topic worth pursuing, not least one who, I discovered, had worked previously in therapy and suggested that I approach dramatherapists as potential research partners. Subsequent contacts with current practitioners had encouraged me further that classical mythology’s potential therapeutic uses would be worth exploring, as has my preliminary reading on dramatherapy.  I reported that when I started reading Jones 2005, I anticipated that I would be solely lapping up new knowledge, but I also found myself thinking from a fresh perspective about material that I had been teaching for several years. I discovered that the approach taken to drama in dramatherapy, not least the application of the Aristotelian model of catharsis, intersects with one of the approaches currently being advocated in classics to the mythmaking of ancient drama which, as Buxton stresses in his chapter in Woodard ed. (Woodard, 2007: 166–89), characteristically selected material that drew upon the underside of myth. Tragedy created a mythic environment that explored what was troubling, problematic and antisocial between the individual and society, as well as between family members such as siblings of the same or opposite genders, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, fathers and sons or fathers and daughters. Ancient drama goes to the heart of dramatherapy as it is described by Jones as ‘forming the meeting point between psychology and drama’ (2005: 41).


To give some indication of ancient myth’s possible value for dramatherapy, I started with a visual image (Attic red-figure cup from Cervetri by Douris; Rome, Vatican 16545) that has been regularly used an illustration in volumes on mythology, due largely, I would surmise, to its combination of popular goddess and well-known story. By depicting Athena as the patron of heroes, assisting Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece which is hanging on the tree behind him, not only does it show Athena in one of her most prevalent guises, but it includes a good range of her attributes too, including the owl which is shown only on relatively few vases. There is much scope for interpretation, for example of how the aegis’ scales match those of the monster in a way that might suggest a ‘dark side’ of Athena, something that Klimt seems to intimate in his Pallas Athena, where the scales of the aegis match those of the Triton in the vase painting in the background
The artist, Douris, has picked a key moment from the iceberg of material at ancient mythmakers’ disposal and packed it into unities of time and place. But precisely what that moment is on the vase is unclear, which took me to another reason why I picked this particular example. It draws attention also to how much remains unknown in spite of the wealth of evidence for classical myth. The mystery for us—not the intended audience, at least I assume not—is in what is happening between Jason and the monster, who seems to be regurgitating him or to be in the process of swallowing him, a detail omitted from the literary versions. There is more as well: Athena’s assistance-giving is at odds with the literary accounts that we possess (e.g. Mimnermus fr. 11a; Apollonius Rhodius, Argonautica 3) where it is Medea who serves as the helper-maiden of Jason, when she assists him in yoking the bulls, sowing the dragon’s teeth and then putting the dragon to sleep while he takes down the fleece.

The image illustrates myth’s mixture of familiarity combined with an otherness that keeps it frustrating with its stories that we know and yet often never really know. Neither did the ancients, however, have some canonical version of a myth as recent work on the topic is stress-ing (e.g. Morales, 2007; Woodard, 2007). What I anticipate being able to bring to dramatherapy is an engagement with this duality of mythology: between the reassurance it provides of a familiar story, combined with possibilities for creativity. I am planning, as one of my initial investigations, an exploration of what might be done with the ‘gaps’ of classical myth in the light of some of the fundamental goals of dramatherapy as Jones introduces them: ‘to free the imagination and to increase spontaneity’ (2005: 4).

One of the things that attracted me to classical studies as an undergraduate student was its interdisciplinarity, although I doubt I knew that term then. Back in 2009, I made the point that I had never really stepped outside the confines of the discipline, broad though these boundaries are. Where I had thought ‘big’, through applying gender theory for example, or comparative anthropology, it had been with a view to enhancing classical research. Now I have an opportunity to be able to think about how research into classical mythology might have an impact beyond the humanities. I anticipate that guiding my further forays into dramatherapy and mythology will be the potential of the doubleness of mythology to reach people with Asperger Syndrome. I felt able to contend at this early stage that classical mythology has the capacity to take someone with Asperger Syndrome into a world that is separate from daily life while allowing engagement with the challenges encountered in everyday life. I was, and still am, at too early a stage in my investigations to make any conclusion other than to say that the therapeutic potential of classical mythology appears to be considerable.

Works cited

• Brown, M. and Miller, A. (2004) Aspects of Asperger’s: success in the teens and twenties, Bristol: Lucky Duck Publishing.
• Frith, U. (2003) Autism: explaining the enigma, 2nd edn, Malden, Mass. and Oxford: Blackwell.
• Frith, U. (2008) Autism: a very short introduction, Oxford: OUP.
• Jones, P. (2005)The Arts Therapies: a revolution in healthcare, Hove and New York: Brunner-Routledge.
• Martin, N. (2008) REAL Services to assist students who have Asperger Syndrome, Sheffield Hallam University Autism Centre, available at www.skill.org.uk/page.aspx?c=61&p=150#HE
• Morales, H. (2007) Classical Mythology: a very short introduction, Oxford: OUP. Woodard, R.D. (ed.) (2007) The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology, Cambridge: CUP.