Page 66 - Proceedings Collega2023

and is always invited to perform as a dancer in Malaysia. She agrees that this alternative process is suitable
for PwDA with depression, however, some improvements should be made, for instance, the facilities
should be more disability friendly.

It is intrinsic to heuristic research that the investigator and the investigated are one, and the same.
(O’Bierne, 2014). The difference in this study from a conventional research practice is that I am acting as
one of the instructors, witnesses, and researcher, consistent with heuristic research. Although each of the
moving, witnessing, and researching are different experiences, in this study they are all my own. In the
creative process, expression involves allowing an impulse to be what it needs to be for movement and
acting. According to Noraziman Kamarozaman (personal interview, 2023) (wheelchair user), the session
makes him feel free and comfortable to express his feelings through dance, movement, and acting. There
is inherent relief from releasing the constraint of it, and a sense of healing as it is held by the attention of
the witness, for it to be reintegrated through the dialogue. The process of the project, allowed the
participants to accept their variety of expressions and loosen the control they usually exercised in an
everyday setting.

In the process of reviewing, I had a sense of revolving around the experience. Each time I reviewed
it I was creating a circle within the previous one as new levels of perception were awakened. A sense of
closure and completion of a circle of the learning spiral clears a space for new endeavors. Observing my
experience of the project allowed me to hear and see what I carried beyond the words expressed in the
alternative process. Finding vocabulary for the range of expression is an important conscious experience.
The process of recording observations of the pilot study gave rise to illuminated insights. Observing
movements and music prompted recognition of the participants’ interactions with space, time, body, and
energy. This became an enlivened source of inquiry for me as, for example, a repetition phrase of
‘statement gestures’ was expressing my emotion in the context of ‘rasa’.

I believe that there is an ever-developing sense of familiarity and trust necessary for the essence
and meaning of the story from the alternative process to be received that requires a little distance
sometimes, alternatively listening closely and accepting other times and constant indwelling. Applying the
perspective of phenomenology, I am me-in-the-world, and not extricable from it for any useful
understanding of how I learn performing arts therapy. Including these elements in my considerations
enhanced the sense of a ‘real-life’ example. “In acquiring data, one’s ability to encounter other people and
the world is no less important than the facility for plumbing one’s self experientially

Conclusion

The nonverbal dimension of the performance therapy process meant that interpreting it felt like
a guessing game to begin with. As my witness in the process, I had direct access to personal experience.
In addition to Igal’s gesture, ‘form shaping’, and rhythmic analysis, my bodily perceptions translated into
communication through the representation of imagination. Witnessing another person’s expression, I
would still have my own tacit knowing and physical perceptions that would guide my perceptions of
imagining what their expression is about. The development of nonverbal language vocabulary as a dance
instructor is important to gain access to expressions that arise from the depths of the respondent’s
unconscious that hold emotions and encoded patterns. Once the expression emerges it can be explored
with the use of established and unique languages developed as the need arises (O’Bierne, 2014).

International Conference on Local Wisdom of the Malay Archipelago (COLLEGA 2023) Page - 53 -