The Wild Beyond: Creativity, Play, and the Future of Expressive Arts Therapy

Tatjana Jansen, PhD Vancouver Art Therapy Institute tatjanaejansen@gmail.comRichard Wainwright, PhD European Graduate School richard.wainwright@egs.edu AbstractAligning with Harney and Moten’s (2013) concept of theUndercommons , this article challenges conventional psychological practice frameworks that have, arguably, marginalized arts-based healing practices, sometimes reducing them to mere tools for analysis rather than full recognition of their capacities. Such reductionist approaches have constrained the arts’ potential to contribute more holistically and transformatively to therapeutic practices. We therefore argue that these historical models often overlook the interconnectedness of humans and nonhuman entities as well as the embodied nature of identity and subjectivity, which are central themes to both the arts and therapeutic practices.Harney and Moten’s Undercommons envisions a space of subversion and resistance, where traditional knowledge and marginalized practices are nurtured, at a length from the institutional gaze that seems to co-opt them. Drawing on Harney and Moten’s work, along with a revisiting of phenomenology through the lens of posthumanism and new materialism and other interdisciplinary perspectives, this paper argues for a radical reorientation in the Expressive Arts. We propose working in the Undercommons, a space that is continuously in motion, engages the ‘wild beyond’ of established norms and pushes for a more expansive and interconnected artistic practice.Keywords: Expressive arts therapy, posthumanism, new materialism, creativity, therapeutic practiceIn Motion: A Constant State of ArrivalIn “Principles and Practice of Expressive Arts Therapy, ” Stephen K. Levine (2005) articulates what is a significant shift from the reductionism of the arts to existing psychological frameworks and a call for us to value the arts for “their own intrinsic capacities… [and] not merely as adjuncts to psychological or social functions. This perspective honors the arts for their unique ability to transform, to create new possibilities, and to engage the imagination in ways that purely psychological approaches cannot” (p. 9).For many of us working in the field of creative arts therapies11Creative arts therapy is an umbrella term for the various arts-based therapies (i.e., art therapy, dance therapy, music therapy, play therapy and expressive arts therapy). Expressive arts therapy is an intermodal approach that engages visual arts, movement (dance), sound (music), poetry and narrative., this has profound resonance; the arts are our way of knowing, of sense-making, and as a field, psychology has tended to create the feeling that the arts are marginalized, flattened, and compartmentalized. While the field of expressive arts therapy (EXA) certainly does not reject psychological frameworks, some run counter to the ethos of the field—frameworks that march on without us (Mandlis, 2009) and that, more often than not, are fracture points in the regimes of truth and practices (Foucault, 1995). As Ellen Levine (2003) suggests, ”[a]s artists and therapists, our ethos is to stay in the imaginal and effective realm and to maximize expression coming from these realms” (p. 181), particularly through the lens of phenomenology.And it is in the ethos of expressive arts therapy that we view the arts as being inconstant states of arrival, always in motion, never quite fully settling into conventional academic and therapeutic frameworks. Instead, they are always in a state of becoming—full of imaginative possibilities, refusing the diagnostic impulse and preconceived ideas of the present ’therapeutic’ moment. Here, we call for shifts in how we value the arts, not as static or secondary, but as ever-evolving and resisting reductionism. Our work is in motion and in a constant state of arrival, where new subjectivities can be performed across and between encounters. It is radical, transformative, and risky; like research that happens in an unsafe neighborhood, “to enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts” (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 26).Breaking the Frame: Dismantle, and DisruptWhat exactly are we dismantling and attempting to disrupt? There are Western philosophical movements that have informed the work of expressive arts theorists, the most significant being phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty’s (1945, 1968) work is relevant here in giving an account of human embodiment, what the living body senses, and the arts themselves appearing as formed expressions and actively shaped. “Here the subject stands as the reflecting, imagining, shaping and speaking member of a world of coherence and rupture, alternately making sense and no sense of [their] life; the human field of the poietic, erotic tension of value and sense making” (Jacoby 2017, p. 86). The materiality of the arts, the process, and art-making as poiesis is central to expressive arts theory, the “thingly act or object” (Knill, 2003, p. 85) that we make sense of through its becoming, along with the co-mingling of people, materials, artwork and environment.From Structuralism’s introspective analysis of consciousness to Behaviourism’s focuson observable behaviour, these frameworks among others flatten the complexity of our individual and collective experiences. As Harney and Moten suggest (2013), these frameworks function in a narrow spectrum, neglecting the ‘wild-beyond’ where the arts thrive, continuously pushing the limits of conventional thought. EXA, it seems, ought to embrace broader philosophical perspectives, including, we argue, posthumanism22Posthumanism challenges the anthropocentric focus of traditional humanism by decentering the human subject and exploring more-than-human relationships and ontologies., new materialism33New materialism emphasizes the of and interconnectedness between human and and some of the other philosophical approaches to research The radical of established norms with the in the of radical and working with of and the interconnectedness of human and we as the reductionist of the we the to be more in the we both and which Harney and Moten as the Undercommons It or the and of the the and other of Undercommons is a where have as or marginalized or being by to to to and to (Harney & Moten, 2013, p. 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