Till Örebro universitet

Disturbances, interruptions, and inconveniences are part of everyday work in the music therapist’s practice in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) and other hospital settings. Infants or parents are asleep, parents are busy breastfeeding, infants suffer from pain or painful procedures and staff comes and goes. Alarms are abruptly going off, CPAP machines and devices intended for respiratory support are hissing and buzzing, and sometimes even rounds seem to be more important than family and patient needs.

These are well-known distracting situations a neonatal music therapist must relate to in her/his treatments with vulnerable and sick infants and their caregivers. Other disruptions are, however, both beneficial and welcome. Parents sing along in the music, staff and students stay to observe, siblings determine the songs, the head of the department comes by. These “disturbances” may create favourable circumstances for the music therapy service and the music therapist. 

Our workshop performs four challenging everyday music therapy scenarios that music therapists from all sorts of clinical settings will recognize and which require different strategies, skills, and tools to manage. We will act out the unresolved disturbances, dilemmas, and possibilities. Instead of delivering premade solutions, we engage the audience to suggest and explore creative and therapeutically meaningful solutions to the various disruptions. Based on the principles of forum theatre developed by Augusto Boal, our workshop takes an interactive and participatory format such that the knowledge, aspirations, and capacities of the workshop participants may be brought to bear on the exploration of viable solutions on the stage. After observing the separate scenarios, the first time, the play is performed again, and invites the workshop audience to stop the play at any point, replace a character whose experience they may understand, and attempt to change the course of dramatic action. In our workshop, spectators are transformed into “spect-actors”, not only observing but acting to change the challenging situations they are presented. We aim to empower the workshop participants and facilitate spontaneity and creativity, collaboration, listening and awareness, communication, effective interaction, confidence and capacity, information and education, problem-solving and community development. Thereby we aim to widen our horizon of therapeutic responsiveness from the macro level of environmental circumstances to the micro-level of the tiniest patient signs.