I About Dance

Dance Comes to the Front Stage in Dance Movement Therapy

Hilda Wengrower

INTRODUCTION

This chapter brings to the fore specific aspects of dance and aims to raise ideas about dance’s intrinsic potential for therapy, i.e. to promote development as well as maintain/ regain well-being in a therapeutic process. The study of dance as a personal experience or as an artistic media and the inclusion of positive psychodynamic psychotherapy may lead to innovations in the conception and practices of dance movement therapy (DMT), thereby restating the role of embodied/danced experience and demarcating its uniqueness as psychotherapy.¹

Dance movement therapy is interdisciplinary, as it defines itself as the therapeutic use of dance movement that integrates psychology, and observational skills, converging into the theory and practice of the profession.

Seligman (2011, p. 868) asserted that psychoanalysis would achieve broader sight when including wisdom from “the surrounding arts [emphasis added by author] and sciences.” He brought up Freud’s call for making use of knowledge from more than one direction. If predicated on these concepts, together with the study of psychology in its different branches we can fortify our field’s root in art. This chapter invites us to turn to dance again and what comes with it, to feel it in new ways and consider it with new resources.

DANCE AS IMAGE OR METAPHOR

Images and metaphors common in cultures or uttered by prominent figures who have an impact in their society reveal meanings and values attributed to some issue—in this case dance. Dance has been used as a metaphor for different meanings. Nietzsche utilized it for light-free thought and life-attitude (Nietzsche, 1998/2008); the idiom “it takes two to tango” denotes the idea that conflicts are based on the responsibility of two parts in relationship. Dance has also been used as an image for tasks or phenomena that demand clever and fine coordination of numerous factors as in research, i.e., “the choreography of qualitative research design” (Janesick, 2000), and I am sure readers remember many more metaphors and images of dance.

As Lakoff and Johnson (2008) demonstrated, metaphors emerge from our body and movement experiences. The image of dance in Western culture has been in a process of transformation through history, beginning in the last years of the nineteenth century. Dancers and dance scholars have coined the term bodily knowledge indicating the knowledge germinated in the practice of dance, as is the case of the dancers who created Dance Movement Therapy (DMT). For example, Chace’s dancing and bodily knowledge led her to practice kinesthetic empathy when communicating with psychotic patients, thus anticipating what experimental psychology' and neuroscience discovered later as embodied simulation (Gallese, 2005; Wengrower, 2010).

Nietzsche (1872/1910) used dance as an image to reclaim the body from oblivion and repression in rationalistic, authoritarian culture and as a metaphor for free/light thinking. He also related to dance itself and saw in the dancer somebody who knows how to listen to the body and transform strength and power (Santiago Guervos, 2008). In spite of its evanescence (movement disappears at the very moment it is executed), dance manifests the interplay of its constituent elements only limited by anatomy and gravity. To dance is to transform oneself into another body without changing skin; it is to discover another one in oneself, to become movement and to feel alive. As Santiago Guervos explained, for Nietzsche dance is also a symbol of living creatively - contemplating the horror of the depths and the harshness of life, overcoming both of them through dance.

The essence of dance is the balance between the basic forces of the body and the spiritual powers in constant fluidity, in continuous threat and recovery: life itself. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra wants to teach people to transcend themselves, using their legs to dance. He exhorted that those who want to learn to fly have to learn to stand, walk, run, spring, climb, and dance. Dance, then, opens new paths, new discernment and a new possibility of life. It is stability in instability (Santiago Guervos, 2008, p. 6).

DANCE MOVEMENT THERAPY: OFFSPRING OF DANCE

While Nietzsche used dance as metaphor, dancers saw its contribution for the individual within the dance itself. For Mary Wigman (1886-1976), one of the salient figures in modern dance history who impacted much of DMT, dance was a “means toward self-knowledge—not a disclosure of personality but a construction of it, not self-expression as self-indulgence but a creation of self in expressive action” (Fraleigh, 1987, p. xxii). Wigman centered her work on the question, “Who am I?” However, her dance wasn’t self-centered but an embodiment of the expressive range of movement (Fraleigh, 1987, p. 28), which often included the exploration of the obscure sides of self, as can be seen in her Witch Dance from 1926 (Mooiman, 2014).

During her childhood, Trudi Schoop, one of DMT’s forerunners, suffered from fears that she tried to control with obsessive-compulsive rituals until finally she could no longer control them: “My infatuation with life’s elements—rhythm, melody, space, shapes, forms— kept me somehow in balance and made me dance. . . . When I danced, I was happy, I had no fears” (qtd. in Berrol, 2012, p. 187). As Berrol analyzed, through her improvisational, exploratory movement, Schoop the girl began to appease the demons threatening her and ignited the possibility of emotional transformation through dance. From then on, Schoop’s dreads transformed into structured dances that became part of the ground for her work as an artist and later as a dance movement therapist (dmt).

Similarly, Mary Whitehouse gr aduated in dance, then studied with Wigman in Germany and was later part of Martha Graham’s company. During World War II, she worked in an aircraft factory. In this position, she observed and experienced the repetitive movements of the women as they worked. She got the idea to form a troupe and later went on to produce performances, thus ratifying her belief that every person can dance from an unfettered and self-connected attitude. Gradually, she developed her professional work on the basis of her study of Jung’s theories and the idea that creativity in movement is healing (Sullwoold & Ramsay, 2007). And of course there is Marian Chace, a dancer who used dance knowledge to relate to people and develop a theory and practice of dance movement therapy that is part of the foundations of DMT (Sandel, Chaiklin, & Lohn, 1993).

As noted in these examples (and as is true of others not mentioned here) (Levy, 1988), DMT’s Western pioneers and their disciples were dancers immersed in this art; their discoveries of the therapeutic use of dance were related to their own experience onstage and/or offstage. Feeling and reflecting on their own experiences with dancing and their students’ dancing, each one of them concluded they had a powerful means to help people to enhance their self-awareness and personal development, assist children’s maturational process, or help persons with psychological difficulties. Although I am not a pioneer, this resembles my process in some ways: I became interested in DMT because I was aware of the impact of dance, mainly improvisational, on myself and my students.

DANCE FOR ONESELF OR FOR THE GAZE OF .ANOTHER PERSON?

Some of the arguments brought by some colleagues who have been deterred from using the term dance for the profession and choose to call it movement therapy stem from the belief that there is a connotation of performance with the term dance, as if it were something done for others and appraised by them or something that’s focused on pleasing an onlooker. Sharon Chaiklin and I thought that this view comes from a narrow understanding of dance, and so we proposed the following definition:

Dance is used in the broadest sense of body movement, which may involve a small gesture or the total use of self. It lasts over time, perhaps merely a brief moment, and may use rhythms or not. It may spread out over space or use only that which one’s body inhabits. However, in all cases, it is a motor action that emanates from an individual in response to internal sensations or perceived external stimuli.

(Chaiklin & Wengrower, 2016, p. xxx)

Contemporary concert dance has for a long time blurred the barriers between addressing an audience in a theater, non-professional dance, and daily life movement. The sociocultural movement of education through arts (Laban, 1963; Read, 1943) and the explorations of choreographers and dancers stressing movement freedom have led to a sense that dance is to be danced and felt. This new conceptualization thus lowers the place of narrative in dance, as it was used in classical ballet, and offers new possibilities for everyone to dance. Now the differences between professional and amateur dancing lie in the mastery of the movement and its sophistication, intention, motivation, context, and structuration.

Reading Fraleigh (1987), who focuses on the self-awareness of the professional dancer, it is easy to associate with the experience of the person dancing for themselves. The dancer is/must be connected with themselves; if they is concentrated on the scrutiny of the spectator, the emotional impact on the audience is lost. The performer gets to know themselves through their work in a dance on a universal level; their being is part of the collective of dancers and they also gains self-awareness on the individual level as a unique person. In some psychotherapeutic practices in DMT, the universal is considered in therapy without neglecting the focus on the individual.