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...

I am not sure whether this is actually true: Autism Acceptance Week – Tuesday… From Richard Burton, to the autism test, to forcefields

I am not sure whether this is actually true, but I remember hearing decades ago that Richard Burton would never watch a performance of himself. I’m not sure why – perhaps it was because otherwise he would be constrained. Perhaps he preferred to be in the moment, like a stage actor.

And so, I’m not sure why, and I’m not even sure whether this memory of something I recall hearing while a child is accurate. But it’s been something I remember, because it resonates, I think, with how I feel about my practice as someone who has been ‘in the moment’ a lot – teaching, delivering papers…

I used to freeze were I recorded, let alone filmed, and I do not feel comfortable speaking to any group if a door is open. Then zoom-teaching came along with Covid, and recording sessions because normalised pretty quickly. When I started teaching remotely and running events that way, pressing the record button – and later watching things back – became part of my practice. And I felt surprisingly okay with it, however much watching an earlier version of me, if only from a short while earlier, seemed strange.

I’ve had the video recording of a remote talk I gave a few months ago on my autism-myth project for a while but could not bring myself to look at it until recently - and it’s okay! - although I do say ‘um’ a lot because I’m never reading a script but talking in the moment – responding to the ‘room’. And one thing that helps me feel a sense of ‘connect’, I find, is the chat facility.

Screenshot from zoom talk - an earlier one (likely in 2021 or early 2022)
from the one mentioned in this posting

I noticed during lockdown that autistic people sometimes like zoom chat. For my part, I tend to be pretty active there during any session I’ve joined – otherwise, I can’t really process what I’m hearing. It’s a substitute for the feeling of ‘presence’ of in-person events, I think.

Anyway, as well as reviewing the video, I have been looking at the saved zoom chat from during the event including from where I asked participants, if they wanted, to introduce themselves. Some participants shared their experiences of autism including as autistic people and one participants said something that resonated when they introduced themselves via the metaphor of being bilingual – that is of speaking autism and speaking like a neurotypical person, coming I think, from having been negotiating a neurotypical world as an autistic person who had no idea that they were autistic – when then had no idea, until, I think, their children’s diagnosis as autistic that they could be autistic when they didn’t fit the images of autistic standardly put out.

I will develop this later. But, writing about how far an autistic person ‘has’ autistic traits has got me thinking about the ‘autism test’ which Simon Baron Cohen devised and which, last time I looked, was available online. You answer a set of questions by ticking four options ranging from ‘very’ one thing to ‘very not’ the same and end up with a score that puts you in a category of very, to potentially, to not autistic.

Has anyone reading this taken this test? If so, how many times? I’ve taken it several times, firstly years back, because I guess I had been buying into a view that autism, as the ‘spectrum’ it was generally then seen as, could be pinned down, as though each person could be found somewhere in a scale from ‘very’ to ‘not’.

Anyway, each time I have done it, I have got a different score. So what does this mean? Does this say something about the test, or about myself and how I connect with a world I’m in or not in?

I always loved forcefields as a child... they would figure from time to time on tv shows I’d watch – at least this is how I remember it - and I’m increasingly finding the forcefield image a helpful one to convey what it’s like to move in the world while feeling apart from it.

Later, this Autism Acceptance Week, I shall build on the thread that has been running though this posting of being in/not in worlds by writing about a way of conceptualising what it is to be autistic, and non-autistic. This is Double Empathy Theory.

More tomorrow…