More from Dance Therapy Class

Last night my professor was at a Dance Therapists' Conference, so she left two movies for us to watch. The movies showed dance therapy sessions with all kinds of different populations: prisoners, psychiatric patients, a normal (meaning not diagnosed as psychotic) woman, elderly patients confined to wheelchairs, normal preschoolers in a group, disturbed preschoolers in a group, autistic children in one-on-one sessions, the parents of psychotic children in a group of adults. It was fascinating to see the therapy in process. It helped me to get a sense for how what we do together in the class relates to the actual work.
The videos were extremely moving in some cases. The work with the two autistic children moved many in the class close to tears. The children couldn't relate to any other people, they didn't play with toys, they just spent their time in a bare room "stimulating themselves," which sounds funny to me, but that is the technical language that was used to describe autism in the videos. The therapist started by imitating the child's movement, so that the child would understand the therapist as trying to learn her language. Eventually, the child would allow the therapist to get closer, and then touch was allowed, and finally the child would welcome touch and even run after the therapist if she moved away. Once that started, the children would want to be held, nestled, rocked, and basically treated like infants. They would explore the therapist's body the way toddlers explore bodies, touching everything, pulling at her hair. And after that, the children would start to recognize that they had a separate body, studying themselves in the mirror.
This was a common experience for the disturbed children. They needed a certain amount of physical nurturing, and the therapist would imitate nursing positions, pretending to feed the children with her fingers, all to give the children that experience of bonding and love.
When working with adults, the therapy seemed more about free expression of emotions. It was also a return to that primal experience of knowing you have a body and using it to communicate. It seems that with adults, the biggest problem is that the demands on the intellect and conformity lead people to forget about the body. Kind of like I've heard it said about art--most people are encouraged to draw as children, but then we stop once the demands to read and write become more pressing. So most adults draw like children, because they stopped their artistic development as children. It seems that the same can be said about using the body to communicate. The body is our first language, but once we learn verbal language, we can shift to forget about the body. And yet, by returning to the body, adults were able to better access their emotions and learn how to use those emotions well. Anger was the scariest emotion to express, and work with prisoners and psychotic patients really focused on how to express it but not let it overpower and control the person. There was also a lot of work that focused on how to relate to a group, how to stand firmly on one's two feet, and how to feel supported. And with the elderly in wheelchairs, the session was mostly about touch.
I also enjoyed watching the therapists in the videos. There was a noticeable ease that these women had in their bodies. They could be so expressive with their movements. They were so open to their patients. It made it clear that like drawing, this is a skill that will improve with time.