HUM 6365 – Collaborating Across Disciplines

While I love dancing and wish that I was better at it, I would not consider myself a dancer. We move every day just getting out of bed, walking, bending and reaching as the day goes on. Some days there is stretching and maybe exercise. Jumping is rare and so is running. Stair climbing is a frequent movement activity, as I live in a house with multiple levels downstairs (built in the 70’s when that sort of thing was popular) and then there is the long flight to the second floor. Just like you cannot go anywhere in Jacksonville without crossing a bridge, you can not go to any room in my house without traversing a few stairs or more.

For this week’s assignment, I selected a dance/movement prompt for the American Dance Therapy Association.  It said to “Imagine your name written in huge letters on the floor and travel on those lines as a pathway. Start with everyday walking, then change it up: travel backwards, sideways, circling. Add gestures, and a sense of character. Repeat some things, pause occasionally and then start up again”. I added the scarves because the same document said that children love to use scarves because it helps them to feel the movement. I can remember playing with scarves and pretending that I was some exotic dancer when I was a little girl. And doing this assignment made me feel rather childish. Yet it was oddly relaxing and energizing at the same time.

As you can see in the video, my little doggies decided to check this action out and seemed to be very happy to see me dance and move about. I sit for long periods of time at the computer so this must have looked very odd to them. It was fun to imagine my name written in script. The capital L is so beautiful in script format. I laid on the floor, too trying to spell it out in block letters. Very awkward. I much preferred the flowing letters of script.

This was out of my scope of practice for several reasons, but mainly because I am not a dancer and would most likely never encourage a patient to dance. I might ask them to do some Yoga movements but that is as far as any movement goes in my work.  In addition, I would not have any idea what kind of prompts to give someone to help them get in touch with their inner being and I believe that is what dance/movement therapy does for a person.

This was an interesting assignment for me as I did a lot of reviewing of dance/movement therapy videos on YouTube. During that process, I discovered a program called 5 Rhythms, which I am very intrigued by. You can learn more about it here. http://www.5rhythms.com/. Gabriella Roth is the founder of the program and there is a facilitator close to me in St. Augustine.  I could not discern from the web site whether it is therapist or an artist in residence but it does call more investigation, as it looks very interesting. Roth says the 5 Rhythms are flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness.

The dance/movement therapist I interviewed was an amazing person who is actually one of the founding members of the American Dance Therapy Association. Susan Kleinman, BC-DMT, uses her skills as a dancer and therapist to help women suffering from eating disorders. She says that the dancing helps the patient get into her body and out of her head so that she can get deep into the root cause of her eating disorder. I can see how moving and dancing can make you get there because you become very aware of your body as you make the dance movements.

Retrieved from:

http://www.adta.org/resources/documents/samhsa%202011%20adta%20sheets%20(2).pdf