Written by: Lake Angela, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
As a translator for others on the schizophrenia spectrum, I interpret associative thinking for neurotypical listeners. Still more interesting for me and the creative people on the schizophrenia spectrum, though, is the process of translating meaning from schizophrenia spectrum thinking to the nonverbal language of dance as well as translation in the opposite direction, from dance movement to poetry.
My doctoral work and subsequent research further developed theories and my practice of intersemiotic translation, or the translation between verbal and nonverbal languages. My expansion of this project to focus on translating schizophrenia spectrum utterings to verbal and nonverbal language began in depth when I was hired as a therapist to create a dance healing program for 106 long-term patients at a rural United States psychiatric hospital. The outdated and defunded state hospital was considered the final stop along the tracks for those patients sentenced by court order to live out the remainder of their lives there. It was even called “the last stop” by the jaded professionals who had spent their careers on those grounds.
The hospital inmate population was divided into four wards, and one of the wards was particularly receptive to my specialized skills, as it housed many on the schizophrenia spectrum. I found the interactions with those on that unit to be intuitively productive and successful and naturally began planning my dance groups around this demographic.
In addition to continuing my own research on intersemiotics and evolving my translation processes, I had immersed myself in training with several groups while living in Catalunya earlier. There I dove more deeply into the studies of various dance techniques and improvisation practices. Most often, I performed movement experiments on myself as a way to heal from physical and emotional injuries before facilitating groups based on the ideas I had generated. The resulting therapeutic dance methods, then, are largely self-invented. I continued to practice and fine-tune them on myself before suggesting any of my techniques to the various groups I facilitated.
The great benefit of this autodidactic way of development as a therapist is that my processes are both creative and well-researched despite their novelty. Another major benefit is that they have been generated and tested by a schizoaffective person—me—so they naturally worked well for the schizophrenia spectrum patients in the hospital.
Still, I believe it made an immeasurable difference to be a schizoaffective artist when working on any of the wards. No matter what a patient’s diagnosis, most sensed camaraderie in my presence and processes; we shared the mutual respect that comes from living with neurodivergent experiences and the prejudices associated with these in the ways we are treated both by a general public and by medical staff, including doctors and other therapists. On the schizophrenia spectrum ward where I was most creative, I could also act as a kind of key to schizophrenia spectrum thinking.
While doctors often dismiss schizophrenia spectrum utterings as unintelligible, I found I could understand the same utterings by following associative patterns I also experience rather than by following the rules of logic that apply to verbal languages. Because dance is a language with many associative possibilities, I gave movement prompts to which patients responded, and we were able to achieve an effective measure of nonverbal communication that I also could translate into words with the patients’ approval. My work then became to develop my understanding of the associative alogic found in schizophrenia spectrum thought processes to give others on the schizophrenia spectrum access to a common language—dance—and to translate their movement back into the words they would like to access for neurotypical audiences such as family members, caregivers, or a general public. Beyond this mission of access to shared nonverbal language, I aim to expand the outlets and audiences for schizophrenia spectrum creativity and promote it as valuable in itself, as a way of making meanings in strongly associative and emotive ways.
The video that follows is an example of schizophrenia spectrum thinking translated into dance movement. These movements emerged from a group effort by patients at the state hospital and are interpreted by me with their approval that the movements are accurate re-presentations. In this video, I perform on these patients’ behalf.
The gestures from which this dance was created originally were performed by group members to illustrate their own meanings in response to verbal prompts I gave to facilitate generating ideas from emotions held in the body. I will illustrate a more specific example with a patient from my groups who also is on the schizophrenia spectrum. I translated R’s gestures into words, creating verbal meanings that he then approved or vetoed, requiring me to interpret again. From the words he approved as translations of his movement meanings, I created a poem. Then, from memory of our dancing together—our conversation held in nonverbal language because he was said to speak “only word salad”—I translated this stanza of the poem back into movement, this time on my body because I was not permitted to film with patients.
R dances and I translate:
When the wind comes—and it will—the earth will quake, will wiggle
a bit, will move, unrolling a bed, curling a nest. The angels emerge
with tangled hair, dirty hands and feet, and eyes like mine.
Eyes that see as they guide angered waves.
You might try watching again to see these elements in the dance video!
The video is named for a phrase spoken emphatically by one of my group’s regular participants. It was my understanding that "I know you choreograph dead bodies" means something like "I believe you come here to reanimate with dance the people who are left here for dead”—or just as likely deadened by antipsychotic drugs.
Significantly, I also practice intersemiotic translation in the opposite direction. While the example given above describes a translation from dance to poetry (to dance), the following is an example of poetry to dance.
This video is a recording of a live performance; the dance is my translation of the Ave Maria performed by dancers of Maha and Company in Long Beach, California. I chose the source text at the request of Sister Barb, a Franciscan nun who wrote to me after seeing my poetry-dance work online. She approved of the emotional power of the translated work and shared it with her sisters.
I found the translation process to be interesting in that the text is so widely known that it has been interpreted and reinterpreted over hundreds of years and geographic and social contexts, whereas I often work from my own, relatively unknown, poems. This piece, therefore, required a new process. I decided to incorporate my understanding of the implications of the annunciation in both a historical and contemporary light, in that I find the message disturbing—the thought of a girl told by an angel that she will give birth to God’s baby is at first more frightening than the joyful stories would convey. My dance was a more liberal than literal translation in that it involved a contemporary perception of historical events and interpreted context more than would a literal translation that aims for a word-for-word correspondence.
I used two figures for Maria, one with bound wrists, the other with bound ankles, but these could have been many more dancers. It also was interesting and added another level of interpretation to explain to the dancers how to perform their parts because they did not necessarily share the same contextual knowledge and understanding of the text or the processes that inform my choreographic translation. Therefore, I had to translate my translation for some performers. For example, I found it worked better to ask the dancer presenting the angel figure to move more like a chicken might because his original idea of majestic wing movement was ineffective. The godhead figure I asked never to make eye contact with anyone else, especially not the “angel” as he reined the dancer in with the ropes. The man crawling across the floor I asked to creep on his belly laboriously in one straight line from right to left according to the audience’s perspective, or “backwards,” for the duration of the show.
I also used directional cues and floor patterns to facilitate a more accurate translation. I used planes of movement and qualities consistent with the Judeo-Christian ideas of high as more godly and low as debased, for example. The religious interpretation of time as chronological in its earthly function and eternal from the perspective of the angelic messenger who says “et benedictus fructus ventris tui” also should influence the translation into dance. The idea of time is variable, especially in its translation across media.
My choreography runs longer than the text itself or the text set to music. Only if I could invoke what is created simply by speaking the text—like the Judeo-Christian God—would I be able to keep the movement to the same duration in time as the text. With poetry, it takes some magic from the reader—the interjection of personal experience, physical-cognitive-emotional, and imagination—to form one kind of understanding and then make that meaning of the poem transpire. The poem allows for more than one meaning, so really the reading of the poem should take on the duration of multiple readings—even more so since the poems with which I prefer to work are not chronological narratives and therefore contain more purposeful ambiguity in the interplay of actions and images. Ideally, the dance translation also should be endless to express all the possibilities for its meanings, but because of practical limitations, my dance translation of the Ave Maria is simply longer than the time it takes to recite the poem!
From this very brief introduction to my intersemiotic translation work, I hope that viewers see the benefit of access to expressive nonverbal languages like dance for anyone who at times might struggle to use the verbal languages of logic our society values. The examples detailed above are reason enough to embrace the value in modes of alogic as effective languages with the benefit of explicit emotional communication.
Whether we consider such notable examples as the Schizophrenic Masters who influenced the Expressionist movement as described in part I of this article or those folk artists given access to an artistic medium for the first time within an institution as described in my hospital dance groups, these artists’ works provide ample evidence that we should appreciate rather than fear the otherness of schizophrenia spectrum creativity. We should continue to cultivate expression wherever possible by providing access to nonverbal languages—like painting and dance—that flower on the fingertips and feet of schizophrenia spectrum speakers!
Lake Angela, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Lake Angela is a poet, translator, and dancer-choreographer who creates at the confluence of verbal language and movement. As Director of the international multimedia group Companyia Lake Angela, they offer sessions in guided healing through poetry and movement and provide a platform for schizophrenia spectrum creativity. Their full-length books of poetry, Organblooms (2020) and Words for the Dead (2021), are published by FutureCycle Press. As poetry editor for Punt Volat, they select and publish innovative new poetry in four languages with co-founder Kevin Richard Kaiser. As co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing Services, they help aspiring writers polish their manuscripts for publication. Lake holds a PhD from The University of Texas at Dallas for their intersemiotic translations of German Expressionist poetry into dance and their MFA in poetry.
