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...