An artist hosts a workshop. They invite other artists to join them, in the hope that both they and the participants will get something out of the session, some inspiration for their work.
The motivation is at once generous and selfish. Through selfishness, the generosity is possible. A workshop for which the artist does not have enthusiasm will not be a success.
Move into the therapy space, and this approach is taboo. (Think now of art therapy, drama therapy, play therapy.) Here, there are different considerations at play. For one, there’s a different duty of care. The therapist takes responsibility for the effect of the session on the client’s well-being and has failed if the client suffers distress that isn’t properly held.
But in the workshop space, the artist-facilitator only has, at most, a responsibility to keep participants immediately safe: beyond that each participant takes care of themselves, understanding and appreciating their own limits, removing themselves from the space or from the activity if it’s too much, for example. A good artist facilitator of a therapeutic workshop (not therapy) will tell participants at the start that they should take responsibility for their own wellbeing.
This implies different hierarchies between facilitators and participants and allows for different opportunities. The person holding the space must take on different roles. My experience is as an AuJa trained Play Therapist.
This play therapy takes place in a room that is designed to be as bare as possible, so that the humans are the most interesting playthings. This clears the way for the autistic child to direct their curiosity towards other people, learning some of the skills needed to play, and, through play, learning a host of other skills, such as communication.
In the AuJa model, the therapist is instructed to copy the child’s solitary behaviour, in order to build a rapport; once that is established the therapist will offer an interactive game. The child shows the therapist the way into their (autistic) world and then once there, the therapist offers them a way out through interactive play.
The question we begin with is, what if the Play Therapist approached sessions with selfish motivations as well? What if they approached the work as an artist-facilitator, with the intention of offering proposals to the child, and receiving proposals, that would amount to a collaborative workshop session? Rather than this trajectory of coming in to the child’s world in order to come out again, what if the motivation was to explore worlds together?
What would it do to the quality of the therapeutic intervention for the child? There is every reason to believe that children might benefit from the authenticity of a playful intervention that honestly emerges from an artist’s curiosity, as opposed to a preconceived conception of what play can be. Art is at its core, play. So if a Play Therapy intervention is more effective insofar as it is more playful, then it seems likely that the adult taking the role of artist-facilitator rather than therapist would lead to more playfulness, and better outcomes.
How would it affect the kinds of neurodivergent ways of being that the sessions promote? A preconceived conception of play is very likely to be (let’s risk using the adjective) a neurotypical conception. Especially in this context, when we are talking about a therapy designed by parents to cure their children of autism, we can guess that the possibility of an autistic playfulness is much more likely to be found in a session that does not carry preconceived notions. I believe that a play therapy in run by an artist-facilitator who is just as interested in exploring the world of autism as promoting the world of neurotypicality, will be more affirmative of the child’s way of being.
Which leads to further questions: what is the relationship between neurotypicality (and its many opposites) and play? And do we want therapy to affirm autism or teach neurotypicality? And are these two goals rival or complimentary?
Okay, so one possible ‘what if’ will be the quality of the play-therapy intervention for the autistic child. Another will be the possibility of complicating our understanding of the relationship between neurotypes and play.
But for this to work, we also take the artist’s selfishness seriously – so this workshop model will have outcomes on the part of the artist facilitator. In my “Artist/Arachnean/Studio/Spielraum” experiment, they will eventually produce work that is grounded in the Play Room sessions but isn’t necessarily about those sessions. They go in with an openness to play, also to find a playfulness, prepared to offer proposals that they hope the child will find interesting or enjoyable, and knowing that they will likely be met by suggestions that are at least as forceful. Within this unimposing frame in the Spielraum something will certainly take place.