Pockets of resilience: Musician-patients’ creative responses to Covid-19

Abstract

David Byrne’s electrifying show American Utopia was the last live performance I attended before the Covid-19 lockdown in NYC. Electrified by Byrne’s Brazilian-inspired marching band, I danced in the aisle and sang along to my favorite Talking Heads tunes. I was joyfully teleported to drumming in percussion ensembles and rock bands of my youth. I cherished my first Talking Heads Album, Remain in Light, a gift for my 16 birthday and an inspiration to find my groove. When Covid-19 perturbed our natural rhythms and going on being, social inequities were thrust on center stage. This disruption created opportunities for social reckoning. In dialogue with patients, we wondered how our social and psychic worlds would be altered irrevocably, creating opportunities for revitalization, reordering, or returning to the status quo. Like many psychotherapists, I was fortunate to continue work via telehealth. As I moved my practice to digital platforms, my musical listening perspective became even more pertinent. As the two-dimensional aspect of video conferencing eclipsed my embodied presence, I focused intensely on the vitality affects communicated via my patients’ verbalizations (e.g., tone, rhythmicity, and prosody) and gestures, the nonverbal information that enlarged my empathic understanding, my affective resonance, with my patients’ felt experiences. To augment embodied communication, I mimicked or mimed my patients’ subtle movements to expand our bi-directional communication. Sometimes this cross-modal “matching” remained implicit, and, at other times, we explored the meaning of our musical give and take—our shared choreography. Bette, an actress-patient, for example, spontaneously shimmied (shaking her shoulders in a dance) in anticipation of a first-time social event. Without thinking, I mimicked her movement, and we spontaneously engaged in a liberated therapy dance, miming, and mirroring each other’s movements with our improvisational flair (Ferguson, 2020; Knoblauch, 2011; Nebbiosi, 2016). We saw each other and ourselves over zoom and laughed at our absurdity—the absurdity of it all. There was embodied freedom, a shared relief that something shifted after a traumatic period as we exhaled deeply. I noted my embodied pull toward aliveness—an antidote to the tug of deadness in my history—my proclivity to reach for enlivened experience, generally, and a desire to add buoyancy and life to the (at times) flattened and static zoom experience. For patients in the performing arts—musicians, dancers, and actors who rely on in-person engagement—their creative lives were overturned, dramatically altered, or ceased to exist