Dance Movement Therapy
Defined, dance movement therapy (DMT) is the psychotherapeutic use of movement and dance as part of treatment programmes. A DMT practitioner leads sessions within a therapeutic setting, using movement to help establish emotional, cognitive, physical, social integration and balance.
Dance therapy activities, benefits
Dance therapists employ a range of different dance and movement activities and techniques. Some examples include:
Travel – Clients are encouraged to move across a room in any way they choose in relation to a prompt the leader provides, instructions subject to change.
Mirror – Similar to travel, this activity allows clients the opportunity to look at their movements in full-length mirrors. As the leader gives movement prompts, they watch their body’s response.
Mirroring – Reflecting and echoing movements can show empathy and validate feelings. A therapist may mirror your movements, or clients one another, allowing one to see oneself reflected.
Life’s Journey – A leader may ask you to demonstrate your life’s journey, from birth to where you envision yourself in the future in a series of movements. You’ll be asked to depict your development physically through life’s stages. Your childhood – what did it look and feel like? Adolescence? Young adulthood? Today? Tomorrow?
Simon Says – Perhaps an activity you played many times as a child, it allows one to focus on and follow simple instructions, even mimicking the leader’s movements, prompted by “Simon says”.
Movement Metaphors – Using a movement metaphor or prop that can help you physically and expressively demonstrate a therapeutic challenge or achievement. Your therapist may present you with metaphors or props to incorporate into movement.
Valuable skills can be learnt during the dance movement therapy process. Here is a short list of some of these:. Learning how to grow and trust your ability to be present empathetically.. Being able to react authentically, openly and truthfully.. Learning how to translate or integrate movements into insights that can be used in recovery.
Feelings and life experiences live inside your body and can get trapped or “locked in” there. The body can be the key to unlocking profound levels of healing. DMT can be used in conjunction with other therapies to help connect to genuine, long lasting change.
Eurythmy
The word eurythmy stems from Greek roots, meaning beautiful or harmonious rhythm. In 1911, Rudolf Steiner conceived a new art of movement which involved the study of human anatomy, the human step, a contemplation of the movement implicit in Greek sculpture and dance, and to find movements that would express spoken sentences using the sounds of speech.
The most prominent elements of Eurythmy are:. The centre of gravity is the heart centre, not the hips, as in dancing.. You are working with cosmic space around you, filled with life force.. You are sculpting the space around you with your body. You are making gentle, subtle gestures with your body.. You are enhancing the experience of the music with your body.
Eurythmy as part of anthroposophy
Eurythmy is part of anthroposophical medicine and claimed for therapeutic purposes. Steiner saw eurythmy as a unique expression of the anthroposophical impulse, which is serves to bring a greater depth, wider vision and more living spirit into the other forms of art. The art of Eurythmy can grow only from the soul of Anthroposophy. Steiner believes when people do eurythmy they are linked with the supersensible world.
The movement of eurythmy
The dancer’s movement repertoire mirrors the sounds and rhythms of speech, to the melody and rhythms of music and “soul experiences”, such as joy and sorrow. Once these are learnt they can be composed into free artistic expressions. The dancer also cultivates a feeling for the nature of straight lines and curves, the directions of movement in space (forward, backward, up, down, left, right), contraction and expansion, and colour. Minor moods are more inwardly directed, whereas major moods are more outwardly directed. The element of colour is also stressed both through the costuming, usually given characteristic colours for a piece or part and formed of long, loose fabrics that accentuate movements rather than the body form, and through lighting on stage which changes the moods of the piece.
Eurythmy’s goal is to bring the artists’ expressive movement and both the performers’ and audience’s emotional experience into harmony with a piece’s content, so eurythmy is sometimes called “visible music” or “visible speech”, expressions originating with Steiner.
Speech eurythmy
We need to find the magic of the words and sounds through our bodies. We are all magicians . . . eurythmy is often performed with spoken texts such as poetry, stories or plays. Speech eurythmy includes such elements as the sounds of speech, rhythms, poetic meters, grammar and mood. In speech eurythmy all the sounds of language have characteristic gestural qualities: the sound of an “A” is open due to the position of the articulators during the vowel. A “k” sounds sharper due to the manner of articulation of the consonant.
Pedagogical eurythmy
It is taught to all ages from preschoolers to graduates. Its purpose is to awaken and strengthen the expressive capacities of children through geometric movement and patterning, bringing imagination, ideation and conceptualisation to the point where they manifest as “vital moving forms” in physical space. They improve balance, coordination, concentration, rhythm and form an awareness of patterns.
The precepts of anthroposophical medicine say a human has four aspects: spirit, soul, life and matter. Eurythmy is one of the practices said to act on the “life” aspect, and “improves health-related life functions”, “re-integrating body, soul, and spirit”.
Have fun with the two dance forms, described above, for they steer away from too much structure and rigidity; give yourself permission to let go of perfectionism. Be light on your feet and dance on air as if no-one is watching!
. Marguerite Black from Somerset West is an author, therapist, mentor and coach with an honours in Psychology and MA in Creative writing. She wrote The Dandelion Diary: The Tricky Art of Walking and founded the NPO The Dandelion Initiative, which offers creative arts therapy, play therapy and trauma counselling to disadvantaged youth. She can be contacted via email at cmblack@mweb.co.za.
