Peek-A-Boo and our First Stories
A presentation
Mica May — Play Therapist UK, John Mukeni Namai — Actor and Participatory Storyteller, Kenya.
Peek-a-Boo. The most important game we ever play, creates the original context for understanding time.
Using Participatory Performance, Play and Theory they weave paths through potentially terrifying landscapes of timelessness into developing understanding and resilience.
May suggests that Peek-a-Boo is the most important game we ever play. By enabling us to create the original context for our understanding of time, this allows us to begin containing our own emotions.
This workshop allows participants to explore and comprehend how experiences are transformed and integrated, becoming memories that we can bear.
May uses Peek-a-Boo to describe how babies begin learning to ‘contain’ themselves through their dawning comprehension of time and by externalising experience in Story.
Through work with clients with PTSD caused by childhood trauma, May has developed an understanding of the ways we integrate experience to create memory, and how abuse and neglect prevent that, resulting in the retraumatising experience of flashbacks.
Conceptualising time, the most abstract dimension is an integral aspect of this and vital to all of our understanding.
May believes that playing Peek-a-Boo is natural and positive. She further suggests its absence has serious negative effects on the developing personality.
Her collaboration with John Mukeni Namai is enabling them both to bring this perspective to a wider audience through use of storytelling and performance.
Bios
Mica May has worked with abuse survivors (child and adult) since 1990, training as Counsellor, Family Support Worker, Reiki Master and Play Therapist to enable her to meet clients’ needs — including DID, PTSD and flashbacks.
‘Our understanding of time drastically impacts the way we experience everything; we make up Storys to help us make sense of it all, the quality of what happens to us before we know that time exists has a huge effect on how we go on to experience life’.
May uses play to help clients cope with the ‘unspeakable’ in ways that require no words and to transform experience to memory.
John Mukeni Namai acted with National Theatre of Kenya moving into Participatory Storytelling 11 years ago. His audiences are diverse and his work addresses a wide variety of issues. John performs with children in hospitals, youth in rehabilitation centres and entire communities.
‘I believe the shortest distance to reach people is through Story’. John has lead exchange programs with international organisations of arts and culture, primarily between Kenya and Denmark since 2013.