Dançarinar as an ethical act in the follow-up of children in mental health

Abstract

This paper is an extract from the thesis “Policies of the encounter and the wild forces in child and young people care” held at the Post-Graduate Program in Psychology of UNESP-Assis. It is a narrative of a story presented through issues pertinent to the psychosocial care clinic with children and young people. The composition of this story had the challenge of diverting from the narrative of unique stories, from the reproduction of only a majority place to allow new perspectives. It was named as the complexity of forces, crossings, and events present in the situations of clinical practices, which give visibility to the different ways of building rapprochement, relationship, and care. This text shows the history of Violeta, a child with autism. Throughout the writing, questions about working with groups in the CAPSij, the corporeity of children and adults, and the strategies of production of the common are highlighted. Such questions are strengthened by the composition with authors such as Deleuze and Guattari, Fernand Deligny, Lapoujade, and Lepecki. It was concluded that betting on the bodies' ability to enter into connection or access primordial communism, by challenging adult-centeredness, maybe strategies triggered in the childhood clinic.

Keywords:
Mental Health; Professional Practice; Body; Dancing; Occupational Therapy

Resumo

Este artigo é um relato de acompanhamento apresentado na tese “Políticas do encontro e as forças selvagens na clínica infantojuvenil”, realizada no Programa de Pós-graduação em Psicologia da UNESP-Assis. Relata uma história composta por questões pertinentes à clínica da atenção psicossocial com crianças e jovens. A composição dessa história acolheu o desafio de desviar da narrativa de histórias únicas, da reprodução de somente um lugar majoritário, com o intuito de dar passagem a novas perspectivas, fazendo aliança com a ideia de minoração deleuziana. Na tese, chamou-se a complexidade de forças, atravessamentos e acontecimentos presentes nas situações dos acompanhamentos clínicos, que dão visibilidade aos diferentes modos de construir aproximação, relação e cuidado, de políticas do encontro. Apresenta-se o acompanhamento de Violeta, uma criança com autismo. Ao longo da escrita, são pinçadas problematizações sobre: o trabalho grupal no CAPSij, a corporeidade das crianças e dos adultos e as estratégias de produção do comum. Tais questionamentos são potencializados pela composição com autores como Deleuze e Guattari, Fernand Deligny, Lapoujade e Lepecki. Concluiu-se que apostar na capacidade dos corpos de entrar em conexão ou acessar um comunismo primordial, ao desafiar o adultocentrismo e a redução da sensibilidade e afetividade corporal, podem ser estratégias disparadas na clínica da infância.

Resumo

Este artigo é um relato de acompanhamento apresentado na tese “Políticas do encontro e as forças selvagens na clínica infantojuvenil”, realizada no Programa de Pós-graduação em Psicologia da UNESP-Assis. Relata uma história composta por questões pertinentes à clínica da atenção psicossocial com crianças e jovens. A composição dessa história acolheu o desafio de desviar da narrativa de histórias únicas, da reprodução de somente um lugar majoritário, com o intuito de dar passagem a novas perspectivas, fazendo aliança com a ideia de minoração deleuziana. Na tese, chamou-se a complexidade de forças, atravessamentos e acontecimentos presentes nas situações dos acompanhamentos clínicos, que dão visibilidade aos diferentes modos de construir aproximação, relação e cuidado, de políticas do encontro. Apresenta-se o acompanhamento de Violeta, uma criança com autismo. Ao longo da escrita, são pinçadas problematizações sobre: o trabalho grupal no CAPSij, a corporeidade das crianças e dos adultos e as estratégias de produção do comum. Tais questionamentos são potencializados pela composição com autores como Deleuze e Guattari, Fernand Deligny, Lapoujade e Lepecki. Concluiu-se que apostar na capacidade dos corpos de entrar em conexão ou acessar um comunismo primordial, ao desafiar o adultocentrismo e a redução da sensibilidade e afetividade corporal, podem ser estratégias disparadas na clínica da infância.

Palavras-chave:
Saúde Mental; Prática Profissional; Corpo; Dança; Terapia Ocupacional

1 Introduction

This article is a follow-up report presented in the thesis “Policies of the encounter and the wild forces in child and young people care”, carried out in the Post-Graduate Program in Psychology at UNESP-Assis. Through the narration of smaller stories - that seek to orbit around clinic issues with children and young people in the context of the Psychosocial Care Centers for children and adolescents (CAPSij) - the research intended to show issues pertinent to the clinic of psychosocial care with children and young people (Silva, 2018).

The compositions of these stories had the challenge of deviating from the narrative of unique stories, from the reproduction of only a majority place to allow new perspectives. The children and young people in mental health care, especially when on the outskirts of cities like São Paulo, have some unique story plots that cover essential complexities for thinking about the clinic. The view reduced to poverty, to the symptoms presented, to phenotypes linked to marginality and with the lowest social value reduced to families that escape the molds of healthy and normal continues the unique stories, hegemonically reported from the rooftops. One of the most constant attempts in producing the stories presented so they could reach a common plan and resonate with so many other stories was to unbalance the elements of power. For this reason, the term “minors” as a minority operation mentioned by Deleuze, in which, by unbalancing power relations, it allows “[...] to liberate becoming against history, lives against culture, thoughts against doctrine...” (Deleuze, 2010, p. 36).

Mitigating stories that seem to be unique and that reduce suffering, differences, and transformations to symptoms, pathologies, and care protocols is a way of seeking to escape the clichés that inhabit the mental health area. These clichés produce fixed and hardened images of children and young people, classifying them as crazy, with undesirable behaviors, and defining the action of professionals as techniques in favor of adapting results. Through Violeta's follow-up history¹, we intend to bring up issues related to the composition between bodies of adults and children and the forms of organization of collective follow-ups.

2 Violeta

Screams, shouting, and more screams. Treble, irritating. Screams that echoed throughout the service, showing her presence. Small body, approximately three years old.

Violeta came to the service brought by her mother, involved in a mess of which little was possible to understand. The child arrived with her screams/shouts and the mother agitated and tired.

There was a lot of talking with the two of them, in Portuguese. Little was understood. The family was from Bolivia and, although they had been in Brazil for a while, they spoke very little Portuguese, as they spent their days almost uninterruptedly in the sewing factories in the city center. The sewing routine was experienced by their two daughters since the mother and father alternated in shifts to sew and take care of the family routine.

Violeta was often on the floor, cried, screamed in an experience of deep anguish. Her mother tried to communicate, as little as she could in Portuguese, what scared and worried her about her daughter.

They started to participate in a group for young children and their families. This group was in the late afternoon, once a week. The participants remained together, creating games and small connections between the children. It was a support group for family members who were experiencing intense difficulties in caring for young children. The coordinators worked together to build gestures and possibilities of interventions with family members, and to conduct longer conversations after group hours with families who had some emergencies. After some time in this group, Violeta started to participate in another group of children without family members/caregivers, who participated, at the same time, in another group, with other professionals. Gradually, it was possible to increase her frequency at CAPSij and Violeta attended twice a week on average. There were two different proposals, demanding from the coordinators' conversations and a willingness not only to receive her at the beginning of the group work but to help her to be there without her mother. It was necessary to follow Violeta, who constantly sought her mother for the service or simply wandered through space. In the beginning, she was able to spend little time with the children, or with the new professionals who accompanied her, starting a copious cry if she did not stay with the mother in the family/caregivers group. Some days, due to her crying, the mother left her group and went to meet her daughter, to try to calm her down or to leave.

Violeta did not seek out the professionals or pay attention to what they said or proposed. So, part of the work was to be noticed or making professionals, other children or some games become objects of interest to Violeta. The task was to attract her eyes, her attention. The issue of little relationship with people, with the environment and with the proposal was not exclusive to Violeta but also characterized the way of being of other children of the group. Each child had their most particular ways but in general, there was a certain distance between them and them with the professionals. One of the children liked to draw and connect all objects with threads, another said he was being targeted by ants and closed himself using the puffs around his body, another wanted to play ball by himself, and so on... Thus, the group that lasted two hours was an attempt to be together. Each day the coordinators evaluated the ways to get into the proposals: one day, they tried to call the children to get closer to each other, proposing collective games, and on others, each one was accompanied in their movement. The collective games were drawings in the mirror or on large sheets scattered on the floor, games with music, or a circle. Something that could bring children together and build their circulation. Even though each one was in their activity, there was a shared space and it was maybe the place to provide more bonds to strengthen their contacts. “Do what is necessary to make bonds. Do what is necessary? There is nothing to do but allow to make bonds” (Deligny, 2015, p. 109). Another kind of doing, other than the task, appeared in the movement of seeking to be together.

Trying to relieve children from the place of lack or defect in a clinical proposal inserted in a state device, with its protocols and production accounts based on psychopathological diagnoses, is a practice of resistance that can happen in gaps, small breaks. In this resistance, it is necessary to outline this doing that emerges when, as written by Deligny, “there is nothing to be done”. Thus, relieve or deviate from a professional exercise that, at each action, brings out what the child lacks, for having as a starting point what is not there, at least from the normative way of being. By following a certain institutional way of correcting what is lacking in children's lives, this way of professional practice produces an excess that, as written by Deligny, it does not contribute to the access to a certain common, of the network, which is vital. He wrote

[...] the network is not a doing; it is entirely devoid from all to; any excess to reduce the network of rags at the exact moment when the project overload is deposited in it [...] the project overload, which in turn is so coercive that it is taken for the reason of being of the network (Deligny, 2015, p. 25).

In the context of a clinic exercised in connection with the State such as the clinic of CAPSij, it is not possible to operate a devoid of all-purpose, “from all to” or total relief from the “project overload” as Deligny thinks, based on the experience of the close presence in the Cevenas². However, it is possible to create spaces, small breaks, or moments in which we follow-up flows from that arise and disorganize the most normative ways of looking at children and young people, in experiments lived between bodies.

Following the movements of experimentation with Violeta, her mother started to take another daughter to the appointments, in a possible way to coordinate the school schedules and activities of the daughters and collaborate with the presence of Violeta in the group. The group's coordination allowed the sister to participate, somewhat in doubt as to how it would be beneficial for the girls, but opening up to the new possibilities. The sister's presence was very silent, always beside Violeta, with very attentive eyes on everyone present. She also seemed to understand Portuguese very little and her mother said that the school pointed out difficulties in learning and relationships. With her sister, Violeta managed to stay longer in the group, although she was only approaching her sister and not other children. But it was a partnership that was starting to strengthen for spaces outside the group, such as the house. The coordination (carried out by three professionals from different backgrounds) sought to get closer to them and approached them with the other presences.

At first, Violeta had little interest in objects and exercised corporal experiments. She ran, walked, swirled, laid on the floor, rolled, waved her arms. After a while, she discovered the mirror, which covered an entire wall of the room in which the group was held most of the time. It was her and the mirror... among all the others. The sister started to approach other children in the group, which had new entrances and children who played a little more together. She remained there, looking in the mirror, making a change in her facial expression and later improvising small “choreographies”. The other children passed by, collided, watched her private dance.

The mirror started to be alternated with the collages, paintings, drawings that were proposed to the group. The movements were explored, the paintings on the mirror, drawings of the bodies, drawings on the bodies, rhythmic bodily approaches, small dances, bites, pinches, squeezes, and touches. They went to the swimming pool and hose bathing in the heat (improvised with a six-pack of sand), jumping into ball pools, going out to the neighborhood square, collective snacks. The group had a space in which words did not dictate the paths and were not the protagonists of what happened, leaving the professionals, lightly, quieter. Lightly because the words were not stopped or stopped the children's speech.

Over time and with frequency in the spaces, Violeta transformed her way of being together, as did the other children and the coordination. The children's circuits had points in common, in which they exchanged glances, words, toys, and shoves, and when they played separately there seemed to be, on many days, a shared rhythm. These circuits and the points in common were most of the time with objects in use, toys that called the attention of the other, a slide that someone was slipping, the sink with the water that someone opened, the ball circulating between the people, the mirror in the room, the colored pencils composing a possibility of being used. Gestures that were attracting each other. As Deligny (2015, p. 92) says, “[...] it is striking that things have guaranteed priorities, things, not inert things, but things in motion, things and their movement, things in their movement”.

At a certain point in the service, the groups needed to invent a name to be inserted in the production system. They tried to ask the children what name could be given. One child repeated: Group Group. Group Group. The name chosen for the system was not that, after all, it sounded a little weird. But this repetition brought with it something of that experience. A group that explored to be a group, that lived a certain type of group.

From time to time, the team had doubts about this group movement, observations of people who passed by, and saw each one in their way or their exploration and raised questions for the coordination. It was not a question of complaining in the “deviant” group way, but of opening up the field to think about what was that group that did not appear around a single action: everyone painting, everyone playing the same thing. It wasn't a fight, as in other moments of the discussion by the team, but doubts that brought the possibility to explore the problems, as written by Deligny (2015, p. 231), “[...] suspending abusive understanding signals the beginning of a better carat procedure”.

The pulse of that group, which was a space and time to be together, involved moments in which the games composed more with each other, with moments that composed less. Moments when there were no games, but being in space, exploring, or in the same place. In a way, they were all together and sharing an intensive environment, full of small gestures, heterogeneous sounds, strangeness, initiatives, slowness. An atypical group since perhaps it was more of a group-becoming than anything else. Barros (2009) writes about a group-becoming as a way of living compositions by which the different modes of existence can become another.

[...] becoming-group is not, therefore, transforming a group of people into a group from the internal representations that each one can build on the other [...] nor should it become a space of resonance of individual ghosts [...] it is to dismantle the group -molar-intermediate, making contact with formless flows that inhabit the terrain of pre-individual multiplicity. To become a group is to connect with exploding particles from institutions (Barros, 2009, p. 293-294).

The group was in the afternoon and the coordinators took time after the end to fill in the medical records, talk to some family members and evaluate the work between the coordinators. Thus, being able to share the experience, the movements, what was seen, and what could happen. However, being able to have time to rest between tasks to minimally collect the effects of the moment and build passages between the different tasks and their qualities is not possible due to the excess of daily work. Being in a space like this, almost two hours long, in an attempt to exercise a form of coordination, with so many variations and small details, left the coordinators tired, and also they had all the other demands of the service.

2.1 Choreographies

After almost two years in the service, Violeta selected and grouped dolls and started to bite the children near her. Some people were frightened, as it is usual to link bite with aggression and aggression with something morally bad. Thus, there was the job of helping Viole to relate in a way other than biting and also to question these quick links that hid an important contact that the child made with others, opening a field of experimentation of close body contact.

The first words came up and when she did not want something or was angry, angry with someone, a long “Mom” or “Help” was heard. When she said “mom”, she was sometimes directed to her mother and, at other times, to the closest person. Now the dolls in her hands are bathed in the sink, walked in cars, were combed to the sound of movie themes, and cartoons that she began to hum. Violeta looked for the objects she wanted in the space, expanded her games, and on she momentarily entered into the games of others. It seemed as if she sewed her way through the rest of the children. When she was immersed in the game she had started, she became very resistant to interference from other children with shouts and shoves.

There were other experiments with the presence of Violeta in the service. Around the fourth year of her follow-up, Violeta started to attend the space called a living room in the social service and no longer go to “closed groups”³. It was called the living room as a strategy that raised many challenges for the service and that required many discussions. Although the name living room brings the challenge of the clinic in a broader context, producing ways of living more affirmative of the differences in the modes of existence, the socializing at CAPSij was a time when a certain number of professionals, usually 4 per shift (morning and afternoon), available to be with whoever was on duty. Children and young people were able to attend as recommended by their referral technicians (who organized the unique therapeutic projects) or because they were in the service to be welcomed, or in intensive care and spent the day there. This strategy is an investment by CAPS services, often called ambience, but at the beginning, it was underestimated about groups. CAPSij had groups for children and young people of all ages, mostly closed, which lasted from one to three hours and had a maximum of 8 or 9 children/young people. This way of working, with several small groups, often seen as a way of doing traditional practice, was questioned by some professionals who perceived that there was a restriction in the understanding of group and care. The team wondered if this type with several closed groups did not restrict care and relational possibilities since each child was known to only a small number of professionals. However, the focus on prioritizing socializing was never a consensus, as there was also an idea for some people that more open spaces could be less therapeutic.

At the beginning of this effort to reorganize the service, children who were able to circulate more widely and relate to a larger number of people were evaluated. In this evaluation, Violeta was included and started to attend only this open space some mornings a week. The socializing was sometimes mixed and then separated by age group. They even received more than thirteen children by a period with games that involved everyone and that, over time were different concurrent games. The coordinators spread out to follow what was coming. The coordination role of the socializing was similar to the Group Group. The effort was to monitor the flows that emerged, to compose with them, instead of ensuring control of the coordination of what and how was supposed to happen.

This relationship with the control of what could happen is one of the greatest challenges in the construction of forms of care that deviate from the already known and widely used forms. Rethinking the group and the position of the coordination create more directive guidelines on how to interfere with children's gestures; it creates a more chaotic zone that can be germinative for new gestures and elaborations, but if understood as confusion, can be strangled by the need for control. Therefore, there is a need to reconstruct the presence of professionals in such a way as to allow what is chaotic as a germinative of forms, expressive possibilities of the different modes of existence. This is because, to be able to see what differs from normative forms, it is necessary to act in spaces and be able to reorganize controlling or disciplinary ways of affecting the body of others.

In his study of Étienne Souriau's ideas and minimal existences, Lapoujade (2017) affirms the need to be able to create ways of seeing “something”, something else, unique, minimal, of the different modes of existence. Starting from an example about a mother who, distracted, puts the objects back in the “usual” place after they are arranged differently by a child on a table, writing:

[...] we can say that it is the careful disposition of objects that shows the presence of a child's point of view - entirely transported to the disposition of objects. In both cases, we are right; she sees the objects because she moves them and fixes them, what she doesn't see is their mode of existence from the child's point of view, the architecture outlined before her eyes. She does not see the child's point of view: she does not see that there is a point of view - which exists in her way (Lapoujade, 2017, p. 43-44).

The socializing, in the germinative chaoticity⁴ proper to its open way, showed many points of view to be perceived, affirmed, and, mainly, composed by others, in a sharing plan. They were spaces of tangles of lines, of their circuits, different rhythms that made the powers and difficulties jump in each way. In a less controlled space, it was more common for conflicts to arise between children, especially those that made it more difficult to be together. Often, the child arrived with a complaint of “behavior” from the school or the family and, in individual visits or a few people, nothing was noticed. But, in a space without so much control by adults and with many children, these issues became more present. Perhaps the presence of the coordination became more marked in those moments when the difficulties became prominent, because, in general, the bodies were immersed in the games to collaborate with this shared plan.

Lapoujade (2017, p. 48) argues that every way involves a point of view and it is necessary to find it. “Establishing a plan that enables new entities to perceive [...] act on perception, effect a look conversion”. Whoever observed a socializing, captured a universe of manners. Although coordinating something fluid in this way was very demanding and fed the discontent of some people in the service, when it was possible to experience the powers that emerged in this follow-up, we could experience a certain strength in the composition of the bodies, choreographed by the desire to perceive other things, to give birth to new worlds.

In Violeta's participation in socializing, there were words, games, dolls, drawings. She started drawing frequently during these periods. Coloring objects were generally available to children at tables or cabinets, but at the beginning, there was no selection of what would be there or the use of the material was limited. As the drawings were frequent, the professionals of the socializing places started to pay more attention to offer more colors, different papers and started to draw together, making an initial sketch for the child to continue, talking to her about the drawings.

Violeta said a few words without answering questions directly. Faces of people were appearing in the drawings. Faces that gained variations in hair types, skin color, size. The clothes had different designs. Each had a type and color. In this process, her mother also invested in the purchase of drawing and painting materials to leave at home. There was a chance that the drawings were related to CAPSij and school children. In school routine, she participated in collective moments and moments when she stayed in the support room with specialized teachers and started using the computer already looking for some letters. Through what appeared in his drawings, her mother began to calm down, understanding that her daughter, who did not verbally tell what happened to her, expressed something of what she lived.

At the same time that powerful changes for her collective life appeared, Violeta began to appear more anxious. When something was not going well, she would bite her hand, even making serious injuries to it. During this period, the team also used medication as a complement to help her reduce this aggression to herself. Violeta had not used medication and its introduction was much talked with her family who was afraid. As the work continued, her repertoire of words and phrases grew, always enriched by songs. She started to look at us many times, stayed close, and, sometimes, she touched our arms to “request” the attention, help for something she needed, or pinched and bit when she was angry.

One day, part of the children in the community had a snack and she wanted to stay in the drawing-room. A professional came to call her and did it as if singing a song. She looked at the professional and started to answer in the same way.

- Violeta, do you want to have a snack?

- No, no, nooooo.

A small game of questions and answers that another professional joined and a new form of communication was discovered. At other times, we could be with her in a simple murmur of songs or silence.

In any case, the composition of bodies at the expense of a certain control of the other's body and the understanding of therapeutic work with broader objectives than the adaptation and standardization of gestures and behaviors are ways of disorganizing what is already installed in the adult corporealities, standardized. This is strongly introduced in the corporealities of children, with school devices and others that frame their possibilities of movement and circulation through spaces. André Lepecki names the action of destabilizing “[...] predetermined subjectivities and pre-choreographed bodies” as choreopolitics, subjected to a choreopolitics that orders circulation and transit and, despite the excitement, keeps everything in the same place (Lepecki, 2012, p. 57). Bodies in the clinical situation can be enhanced by operations that displace them and keep very little in the same place. The remaking of corporealities, both professionals and of those they serve, is an important movement to open places that make life flowing.

The difference between the experience of socializing and small and closed groups with such children is that the small group evokes a collective chaotic germinative power that more strongly drives displacements to be experienced by professionals, even if they resist such undoing and redoing. Rearranging the CAPSij spaces, that is, expanding them when leaving the rooms with closed doors and occupying the backyard of the house, the kitchen, the garden, the squares in the neighborhood, the reception of the service with running children is to make another floor for composition choreographies can happen. Also, it is to reduce the incidence of what André Lepecki calls choreopolitics. The choreopolicing would be certain management of the movement in the urban area to keep everything as already organized. The author uses the figure of the police to think about this function of ordering the possibilities of circulation and movement. He writes:

[...] the police, in other words, choreographs. In other words, it ensures that, as long as everyone moves and circulates as they are told (openly or veiled, verbally or spatially, out of habit or by beating) and moves according to the consensual plan of the movement, all movement in the city, however, agitated it may be, will produce nothing more than a mere spectacle, of a movement that, first of all, must be a movement blind to what drives it to move (Lepecki, 2012, p. 54).

How much of a policeman is there in a therapist's body? In a professional mental health body? In an adult body in front of a child's body? How organized and hardened are adult bodies to be able to follow other choreographies, deviating from disciplined ways, and understood by civilized people? Choreographies made by children and young people who modify the predetermined functions of the arms by not necessarily making utilitarian movements and throwing them up from time to time; that disobey the line and break the ordering of collective spaces; who make other uses of their voice by not talking but shouting. How can we undo certain types of groupings to live others like living together? What procedures and inventions are needed to collaborate with the remaking of professional bodies in favor of composition with these children, taking them out of the wrong place of discipline and policing?

2.2 Invitations to dance

In a way, in the different follow-ups of Violeta, there was a call for professionals to experience something else, a place other than the proposer of “doing” determined by them. Based on the relationship with this way of being, or the capacity of some autistic children, “[...] our presence is a raft adrift, carried by an element so rarefied in our universe where the symbolic works, that only a few puddles would remain here and there” (Deligny, 2015, p. 232).

Deactivating the objective and intentional mode in which we are used to living - in which each small action must have a specific objective - to be able to exercise a more adrift mode, implies displacements. Displacements, both of thoughts about groupness, therapeutic efficiency, as well as displacements of professionals' positions and postures, can only happen from experimentation. Experimentation of bodies in action, in the present that they live, reaping effects, produced in a shared field, in the passage from one idea to another, from one gesture to another, from eloquence to stuttering. Violeta's follow-up brings elements that highlight passages. In the beginning, it was the bodies initiating contact and building, over time, possibilities to live together for a few hours, sometimes a week. The screams irritated her, her mother, the professionals and for a long time, they were intensely present in the appointments.

In such appointments - the exercise of body and sound composition - breathing, body availability, modulations of sounds, and touch are working tools. Being with children who have different ways of making contact is an exercise that demands to suspend anxiety due to changes in unwanted behaviors so that other things can happen. To the gestures that escape the majority modes, a certain intolerance has been strengthened. Different ways of speaking, children who scream deafeningly, who deviate from patterns of walking, sitting, communicating, being together, have been creating more and more techniques and procedures for containment, training, and relationship.

Theoretical knowledge about autism, early childhood, the mother-baby relationship, and others are important, but alone do not guarantee that an interesting job can be done for the uniqueness of that life that is present. It is also about thinking about what is possible to be activated and remade in corporealities during clinical practice. Work on the sensitive:

An active body is a body whose affective sensitivity is strong, flexible, and labile. Indeed, being affected does not in itself mean suffering. On the contrary, the more the body's aptitude to be affected is reduced, the more the body lives in a restricted breast, insensitive to a large number of things, to their multiple distinctions: this body does not know how to respond if it is not unilateral, to the demands of your external environment, to the problems that the world poses to them (Séverác, 2009, p. 24).

In this way, professionals activate the sensitivity that together with theoretical-clinical knowledge or knowledge of lived experiences, can compose actions that bet on the singularization of lives. Sensitive work is not exclusive to the professional. In the groups, children also lived intense affective processes. Sometimes, the children went home tired, a tiredness that is not only due to physical play but from an affective involvement that happened. There are different dimensions of transformation and work.

The care provided to children who do not rely on verbal language and who call professionals to other ways of together inviting a certain dancer, a “[...] shake or move like a dancer” (Ferreira, 1986, p. 519). Dancing as a procedure experienced in these practices, during the follow-up, which allies with less standardized ways of acting, lulled by Deligny's idea that the use of the infinitive “[...] is the least maternal possible use of verbs since there is no subject for cast off ”(Deligny, 2015, p. 109).

With Violeta among other children, in individual or group visits, there were occasions of contagion with the potential to transform the bodies involved in different ways. This is not about building recipes for how to relate, to get close, to gesture. The speed of speech and its intensity. Nothing like that. Something of a transformation that is experienced singularly and collectively among those involved, which enhances the moment of the meeting.

Follow whirling paths, dances with water, running through spaces, body games of approach, and distance. Dancing with children is also entering a certain bodily state that is different from the usual state we live in. It demands the disorganization of the hegemonically functional form for the exercise of daily tasks, in our social context - this hardened form of an “I”, articulated by language, aware of its acts - to be able to exercise other functions, such as the connectors. “There is no time when the child is no longer immersed in a current environment that he or she travels, when parents as people only function as door openers, threshold guards, zone connectors or disconnectors” (Deleuze, 2006, p. 74).

When it is possible to enhance this affective sensitivity, it destabilizes normative layers that overlap the body, activating its intensive capacity, creating or producing the body “[...] full of joy, ecstasy, dance” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1999, p. 11), made by forgetfulness and experimentation, called Body Without Organs (BwO) by Deleuze and Guattari.

Exercise of disobedience, of twisting the purposes of gestures, of using the voice, of silencing. Permanent contact with children and young people who show unusual reactions in the face of anguish, fear, discomfort, screams, cries, pinches are contacts that produce unrest, putting professionals in motion and producing effects on the sensitive. One of the possibilities, not infrequently, is the impulse to try to make children stop the uncomfortable behavior with orders, based on the perspective of behavior that is not normal. Being adrift, carried away by rarefied elements, calls for activation of the sensitive capacity not to run over children and to make them even more distressed only in places of lack and abnormality. Getting used to the body as an organism means to have little tolerance for deviations from the use of its components. Thus, an imperative is strengthened by having to make the other person speak, gesture, or behave with the devices they have and that they do not use as expected. Much of the time is spent putting words in their mouths and senses in the actions of those who do not. “What do you mean by that? Is that it?”, And “I think he means it.” Or even: “He meant it!”. These are statements that are beyond doubt. Rain of questions, speeches, and divinations that sometimes manage to distance us from accessing another way of being together. As if it were unbearable to inhabit what is not quickly meant.

Is it so sad and dangerous to no longer support the eyes to see, the lungs to breathe, the mouth to swallow, the tongue to speak, the brain to think, the anus and the larynx, the head, and legs? Why not walk with the head, sing with the sinus, see with the skin, breathe with the belly (Deleuze & Guattari, 1999, p. 11).

The organism is a stratum about BwO. It is a “[...] phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, sedimentation that imposes forms, functions, connections, dominant organizations, and hierarchies on it, transcendences organized to extract useful work” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1999, p. 21). Organism and subjectivity contribute to our police actions. To think of a dancer as a procedure with these children, as access to the intensive dimension of the body, or of the BwO, is not to build another stable body shape, but to be able, precisely, to play and operate in the instability triggered by these encounters. Instability of forms, certainties, assumptions. Let something else cross us, if only for a few moments. This does not remove a professional from the perspective of adapting the body of the other completely, but it allows them to draw other lines for the bodies to recover and be able to perform compositions, in addition to inspections.

They are variations that produce different effects. In the context of a practice linked to the state, it would be illusory to say that only one way of acting is possible. Adaptive charging is inserted in the context of the clinic, not only for stage productions but for the form of hegemonic subjectivation. The possibility of variation brings leaks to the clinic so that encounters can be lived out of the desire to be together and not out of tolerance for the other's “misfit”. Having the desire to be with the other, it is necessary to suppress the excess of expectations of results, of anxiety over time, to adjust what diverts from the normative use of the body, of the organs. It is necessary to compose with what seems to be meaningless, to dance in front of the mirrors, to play with the waters of the sinks, to roll on the mattresses of the rooms, to follow dances in space.

It is only there that the BwO reveals for what it is, connections desires, the conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities. You will have built your small private machine, ready, according to the circumstances, to branch out into other collective machines (Deleuze & Guattari, 1999, p. 22).

Maybe the possibility of freeing the bodies for more collective dancers may present important lines to see, affirm, and make possible the different modes of existence. Attempts to empty the space of words and regulations and to remain in a certain silence and in movement alongside children and young people who twist the use of organs. “Softness of having nothing to say; the right to have nothing to say; because it is the condition for forming something rare or rarefied, which deserves to be said a little” (Deleuze, 2008, p. 162). After all, it is always possible to be amazed at what the silence can provide for the body.

2.3 One common

There is a certain dancing named differently in the videos produced by Fernand Deligny and companions. Almost as in silent cinema, movies like “Ce gamin lá” and “Project N” invite viewers to a difficult exercise in a world dominated by verbal language and by fast images and linked to easily accessible representations. These are movies that require those who watch them dive in another time, making what is little seen daily.

Those spectators who can endure the lack of dialogues, the slow sequences in which adults and children are accompanied in their routine tasks, walking through lands without many cinematic attractions, carrying baskets, slicing tomatoes or making bread in a wood oven, experience a deviation from the relationship with images and information that is also configured as a corporal, perceptive and sensitive exercise. As if how the movies are produced purposefully provoked an experience close to what was happening in the space of living with children.

During the research, some collective moments of an exhibition of these movies were followed. Two of them were very interesting: an exhibition at CAPSij and another in a classroom during an occupational therapy course. In both moments, there was a lot of unrest during the exhibition, intense demand for cell phones and their applications, and an annoyance with the silence of the productions. People's attention was diverted from images that at first seemed to convey nothing. At CAPSij, after the screening of part of the movie “Ce gamin lá”, which was not shown at all due to the impression that the group of viewers could not sustain any more time, there was a conversation that brought these elements: delay, slowness, lack of explanation. Elements that spoke of the difficulty of contemporary bodies in silencing the world of meanings, in entering times other than hegemonic and which have their effects on the clinic, as we have discussed.

The predominance of the fast, computerized, and adapter mode of bodies is not exclusive to the current years and, although it has been intensified in the contemporary, it was also a theme present in Deligny's writings while following the work of nearby presences. There, he pointed out that “[...] what was there to cross was language. Better to say that this was just the beginning” (Deligny, 2015, p. 79).

In the images, we observe and relate them to some experiences of a following up by a body composition exercise is the professionals' effort to cross many layers that overlap the bodies, in the processes of subjectification and adultification. There is the silence of the words, as there is a certain trust in the small companion bodies. A certain letting go of childish gestures, which subvert disciplinarizations and add to that way of making small and fundamental breaks.

The figure of the adult opens up possibilities, sometimes seems to mark out children's bodies, but does not seem to fear for them when there are no situations of intense risk. In the movies, children are seen to manipulate objects, such as stones, sticks, knives, without the bodies of adults overlapping those of children. They seem to carry out compositions that support experiments with the objects in the spaces and with the making, such as slicing the tomatoes, without trying to divert children from them. Above all, without trying to compete for the child's attention if he is involved with water, or with the hitting of stones, or with some repetitive and important movement for him.

When viewing these images, some viewers of the movie asked questions based on these annoyances, which problematized what was sought in this experience since adults appear in little interventional ways in situations. Deligny (2015, p. 151) affirms that what they sought was not about teachings, adaptations, corrections but about “[...] what can be common between children and us”.

To think and live this common, it is necessary to carry out operations deviating from hegemonic choreographies, from proposing places that do not allow inventions to adults and professionals when composing with children and young people; it is necessary to understand what is of a policeman in each one and affirm the need to break with what is set as normative.

[...] then communism appears, which can be said to be primitive, but primitive evokes a certain stage, a certain moment, a certain state of history; it would be better to say primordial communism, “which is older and serves as an origin” (Deligny, 2015, p. 80).

As the CAPSij professionals - who had to subvert their gestures, in the search to compose with Violeta in other ways, to create spaces free of movement for children, to follow more than to restrict their drifts -, also the presence close to Deligny carried out their disassembly standardized body. In the movies, adults are observed clapping hands, for no apparent reason, interrupting their circuits to hit stones and produce sound, which, at first, causes strangeness. There was a reason, as they were procedures for inserting gestures into the space that seemed to be important to children, not leaving them in a place of invalidation and absorbing what could collaborate with a sharing of the ways of inhabiting a common territory. The weaving of a network composed of heterogeneous and unusual elements, when thinking in the context of current high protocol practices. Network weave in which the movement gains space and visuality for reflection, producing a policy of bodies that is more interesting and less predestined to hierarchies. “If this network, every girl, had a vocation, it would be to the plot at least some aspect of primordial communism” (Deligny, 2015, p. 82).

We could think of these inventions as acts of trust in the children's experience and in the exploration that deviates from language. Félix Guattari (1985) was also concerned with the domestication of ways of being when thinking about the increasingly early initiation of children by adult-centered ways of life. He questioned:

How can children be prevented from attaching themselves to dominant semiotics to the point of losing any real freedom of expression at an early age? It is modeling by the adult world that seems to take place in increasingly early stages of its development [...] One of the internal contradictions of the so-called “new school” enterprises lies in the fact that they very often limit their interventions to the level of techniques of language, writing, drawing, etc... without intervening in the engine of this modeling whose techniques are but one of the agents (Guattari, 1985, p. 50).

Therefore, the point that seems to us is important and it is up to children to be trained as soon as possible in a certain translucency of the set of semiotic systems introduced by industrial societies. The child does not only learn to speak a mother tongue, but he also learns the codes of circulation on the street, a certain type of complex relationship with machines, with electricity, etc... and these different codes must integrate with the social codes of the power. This homogenization of semiotic competences is essential to the system of capitalist economics: “the writing” of capital effectively implies that the individual's desire, in his different semiotic performances, is capable of adapting, of “translating”, acting from any point in the socio-economic system (Guattari, 1985, p. 52).

Maybe the investment in this relation of production of new choreographies or body compositions, which deviate from the uses of verbal language as a central element, is a way to create the hegemonic tyrannies. Betting on the bodies' ability to connect or access primordial communism, by challenging adult-centeredness and reducing body sensitivity and affectivity, can be strategies that are triggered in childhood clinics. Hubert Godard (2011) ⁵ says that the child, before entering the language world, has a more sensitive body, with the senses functioning in its different possibilities. It remains for adults to experiment with small bodies and allow them to be guided in less hardened ways. It remains to be able to try to stretch, twist, deform their bodies.

• 1
  All the names mentioned in the survey are inspired by the relationship with the characters. We did not mention the original names.
• 2
  Fernand Deligny organized a living space between adults and children with autism in the French countryside. They worked quietly and without requirements regarding the modification of children's behavior.
• 3
  The team called the spaces as closed groups in which they organized their participation in a more controlled way by the nearest age group, with proposals for more sequential activities, in which the insertion of a new child happened only through the conversation and analysis of the team and group coordinators.
• 4
  The formulation germinative chaoticity has reference to the works of Deleuze and Guattari and in particular to the text by Suely Rolnik “New figures of chaos: mutations of contemporary subjectivity” from 1999 (Rolnik, 1999).
• 5
  Interview with Suely Rolnik for the archives on the work of Lygia Clark..
• How to cite: Silva, J. A., & Lima, E. M. F. A. (2020). Dançarinar as an ethical act in the follow-up of children in mental health. Cadernos Brasileiros de Terapia Ocupacional. Ahead of Print. https://doi.org/10.4322/2526-8910.ctoAO1945
• Financing CAPES.

Referências

• Barros, R. B. (2009). Grupo: a afirmação de um simulacro Porto Alegre: Sulina/Editora da UFRGS.
• Deleuze, G. (2006). Crítica e clínica São Paulo: Editora 34.
• Deleuze, G. (2008). Conversações São Paulo: Editora 34.
• Deleuze, G. (2010). O que é a filosofia? Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34.
• Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1999). Mil platôs: capitalismo e esquizofrenia Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34.
• Deligny, F. (2015). O aracniano e outros textos São Paulo: n-1 Edições.
• Ferreira, A. B. H. (1986). Novo dicionário da língua portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira S.A.
• Godard, H. (2011). Entrevista à Suley Rolnik para o projeto Arquivo para uma obra acontecimento: projeto de ativação da memória corporal de uma trajetória artística e seu contexto São Paulo: Edições SESC.
• Guattari, F. (1985). Revolução Molecular: pulsações políticas do desejo São Paulo: Editora Brasiliense.
• Lapoujade, D. (2017). As existências mínimas São Paulo: n-1 Edições.
• Lepecki, A. (2012). Coreopolítica e coreopolícia. Ilha, 13(1), 41-60.
• Rolnik, S. (1999). Novas figuras do caos: mutações da subjetividade contemporânea. In L. Santaella & J. A. Vieira (Eds.), Caos e ordem na filosofia e nas ciências (pp. 206-221). São Paulo: Face e Fapesp. Recuperado em 10 de agosto de 2020, de http://www.pucsp.br/nucleodesubjetividade/Textos/SUELY/novascaos.pdf
  » http://www.pucsp.br/nucleodesubjetividade/Textos/SUELY/novascaos.pdf
• Séverác, P. (2009). Conhecimento e afetividade em Spinoza. In A. Martins (Ed.), O mais potente dos afetos: Spinoza & Nietzsche (pp. 17-35). São Paulo: WMF Martins Fontes.
• Silva, J. A. (2018). Políticas do encontro e as forças selvagens na clínica infantojuvenil (Tese de doutorado). Universidade Estadual Paulista, Assis.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  26 Oct 2020
• Date of issue
  Oct-Dec 2020

History

• Received
  17 May 2019
• Reviewed
  05 Feb 2020
• Reviewed
  19 Feb 2020
• Accepted
  26 Mar 2020