No Patient...

Founding Ensemble Member Andy White on drama and recovery

From The No Child Issue of ArtAntica
Mentioned in this entry: Andy White

On a winter evening in 2002, I was on the fifth floor of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) leading a drama session with patients who were recovering from a wide range of physical trauma, from spinal injuries to neurological damage. This was my third year doing this, and – though I’d been teaching for more than ten years in classrooms across the city, with students from pre-K to high school, working with people of virtually every ethnicity and economic level in Chicago – I was never so nervous as on those evenings I entered the RIC lobby and took the elevator to the 5th floor.

This was a program called ArtsConnect, and I’d been invited to participate by my mother-in-law, Eunice Joffe. Along with her colleague, Jennifer Viets, Eunice co-founded the organization in the mid-1990s to help bring the myriad benefits of the arts into a clinical setting. ArtsConnect brings artists, patients and medical students from Northwestern University together in the same room for brief sessions in drama, dance, drumming, and clowning. Who more than hospital patients, so often deprived of any control over their lives – when or what they eat, when they sleep, their privacy, the rate of their recovery, or even, often, the most basic functions of their own fragile bodies – who could benefit more from the power of creativity, the renewed sense of authorship, the flowering of self-esteem, that the arts have to offer?

The first part of the session was always dedicated solely to the medical students, these doctors in training, expanding their physicians’ toolbox to help heal their patients. They were first and second-year students, and usually incredibly relieved to get away from cramming for tests about physiological minutiae, to look up from pictures of the nooks and crannies of the human body and see, however briefly, the whole patient. In these sessions, other parts of themselves were working – we were engaging not just their brains but their bodies and smiles and hearts, which, presumably, was why they had signed up for medical school in the first place. Given liberty to be their whole human selves, and not just “the expert in the white coat”, their relief and enthusiasm was palpable.

The second part of the session, with both patients and medical students together, was full of unknowns. Patients might range in age from 5 to 75; many might or might not be confined to wheelchairs; some had brain or spinal injuries which limited their abilities to speak, or process information; some could speak, some could not; some could move, some could not. Designing activities that everyone could participate in was challenging, and I always entered the sessions feeling a little panicky. But I always left feeling like small miracles – sometimes very small, almost imperceptible, but real nevertheless – had taken place.

Eunice taught me a deceptively simple game, “I am a Magician.” A medical implement was transformed into a magic wand – often we’d use a large syringe, which helps demystify it and, especially for children, make it less frightening. The patient waves the “wand” and changes another patient or student into whatever they want – a frog, an umbrella, a bagel, whatever. That person then hops, or shelters from rain, or rolls, and then they get the wand and transform the next person, etc. Simple – but this childlike game, in this context, always seemed to hold the most power and offer the most surprises. The cantankerous older patient, when transformed by a little girl into “the president”, cracked everybody up when he lifted his chin and proclaimed “let’s go golfing;” an older woman moved around in her wheelchair as a beautiful fish; the little girl became a seagull; a family visitor transformed himself into a huge bird and had everyone spellbound as he perched, then flew around the room looking positively majestic. These are brief moments of shared delight and group affirmation. Because it’s a child’s game, the patients spontaneously and safely go out of their “comfort zone”, but are rewarded with applause and sometimes amazement from the group. More importantly, they often surprise themselves, striking upon a hidden strength or skill, or quality that they did not know they had, or perhaps thought they had lost.

On this evening in 2002, I had arrived early and had a chance to eat and chat with some of the patients before our sessions began. This was also an opportunity to plug the evening’s session and encourage patients to attend. I sat down with a 40-something woman in a wheelchair, Dawn, and tried to engage her in conversation. My attempts were not received enthusiastically. She seemed disengaged – she offered little eye contact, and her vocal tone was soft and tired. She was returning home the next day, and seemed unexcited about either going home or staying at RIC. Her entire affect was listless and downcast. Nevertheless, she reluctantly agreed to attend the session.

When we began, at first Dawn seemed to hang back, and she watched warily from the edge of the circle. But the exercises, including “I am a Magician” slowly drew her in. She was soon transforming another patient, an amputee, into a ballet dancer. And during “Everybody Story,” she contributed her part to the silly, ramshackle story the group spontaneously concocted as we went around the circle. During the Sculpting exercise – patients pair with either another patient or a medical student and “sculpt” them into the desired shape – she seemed to be particularly in tune, her face rapt in concentration, and in her instruction she used words that made it clear that she was familiar with sculpting real objects.

After the session, I asked Dawn about her apparent familiarity with sculpting terminology, and she confessed to having had some previous experience. She said she was glad that she had come to the session because on her last night in the hospital, she’d gotten to “make something pretty.” When I suggested that she might return to sculpting when she returned home, she said she had allergies now to the dust that prevented her doing it. I suggested working with Fimo clay, and her eyes took this in – this seemed a possibility that hadn’t occurred to her before. We said goodbye, and I wished her luck on her return home. Then, done with my work for the evening, I returned home – thankful, once again, to have all my limbs and brain cells, for the most part, in working order.

I never saw Dawn again, and so don’t know how her return home went, or the long hard slog towards recuperation that followed. In my imagining, of course, the brief work and conversation we shared that evening sparked in her the possibility of returning to her life as an artist. I have no way of knowing. I do believe, however, judging from the change in her affect before and after that hour-long session, that at the very least, for that one hour, she had a brief respite from both the physical and psychological burden under which she habitually labored. And that those brief creative moments when she got to, as she put it, “make something pretty,” perhaps re-awakened in her the possibility of having some control over how she lives her life, and what she makes with it.

My mother-in-law, Eunice, passed away this summer. But she had as clear an understanding of the power of the arts – in education, certainly, but just in life generally – as anyone I have ever met. She knew that giving everyone the opportunity to be artists – in classrooms, in hospitals, in prisons, everywhere – even if in a limited way, even if just for brief moments, gives them the opportunity to recreate their own lives. Whether in deadening jobs or dead-end schools, we too often feel like we’ve lost the power to play, to Create. Painting a picture, writing a poem, picking out a new song on the piano, writing or acting in a play – these things put us in touch with those deeper parts of ourselves we too often don’t have (or take) time to explore, those places inside we too rarely give ourselves permission in our daily lives to rediscover. We all deserve those opportunities, and we need them as often as possible – sometimes to heal, sometimes to move forward, sometimes to re-t ake ownership of our lives, sometimes to rediscover parts of our selves that have been submerged, sometimes to discover things about ourselves we didn’t even know were inside of us.