What is dance movement therapy?
Summary:
This article describes dance movement therapy (‘DMT’) for people unfamiliar with the modality. DMT can help clients connect with their bodies, thoughts and feelings. This therapy values verbal and non-verbal communication, respects intuition and intellect and combines scientific and arts-based approaches. It is designed to be flexible and adapt to individual needs.
Dance Movement Therapy - often shortened to movement therapy - is an innovative form of psychotherapy that integrates three strands: traditional talk therapy, movement and art (including dance).
It has existed in its current form since around the 1940s (in the USA) and 1950s (in Europe) when contemporary dancers (such as Trudi Schoop, Marion Chace and Mary Whitehouse) started taking their work to institutional settings.
However, it has older roots. Long before the advent of modern therapy, the earliest humans used dance and music for healing, ritual and communion as well as entertainment and celebration. In fact, the ‘rhythmically expressive, dancing body’ has 'been ‘part of a continuous healing lineage for over 40,000 years’ (Lauffenburger, 2020).
DMT has no one agreed definition. It is defined, and practiced, differently in different countries. It is a field with tremendous diversity. Therapists work with individuals, couples, families and groups in different settings in private practice, in institutions and in the community. It straddles disciplines. It is a creative arts therapy, like art therapy, music therapy and drama therapy. It is a somatic therapy, similar to (but different from) somatic experiencing and other body therapies. It has much in common with ‘regular’ talk therapy. Dance movement therapists mostly train in academic settings like universities. In common with other mental health therapists, national bodies provide standards and codes of practice which are important for client safety.
Clients are often surprised that a typical therapy session can look and feel similar to regular talk psychotherapy. Talk therapy has many schools, each with its own goals, limitations, and theories of personality, health and healing (Corey, 2018). DMT draws especially from humanistic models that focus upon resources, growth and competencies (Corey, 2018; Goodill & Koch, 2019; Payne, 2017; Quatman, 2015, Johnson, 1998).
DMT also has parallels with modern mindfulness. It promotes moment-to-moment awareness of experience. Therapists are trained to bring qualities of presence to the work and to work with attention with curiosity and openness. As with other forms of therapy, relationship is thought to be the most important active factor for therapeutic change (Geller & Greenberg, 2011; Karkou et al., 2019).
DMT is less well-known than sensorimotor psychotherapy - yet might be considered the original sensorimotor psychotherapy. All enactive embodied therapies value sensory-motor awareness and movement. For dance therapists, meaning emerges from, and is grounded in, sensorimotor experience. Sensing and moving - sensory-motor processing - is understood to be the foundation of self, identity and therapeutic relationship (Geller & Greenberg 2011; Tantia, 2013; Caldwell, 2018, 2021).
Even in sessions that consist entirely of words, dance therapists apply knowledge deriving from dance to understand the client, themselves and the therapeutic relationship. Dance provides a particular lens with which to be, know and think in the world. Dance therapists are trained to ‘think’ without words - by feeling, sensing and moving. Dance therapy researchers such as Sabine Koch collaborate with leading figures from phenomenology and philosophy such as Thomas Fuchs. Together, this ‘inside-out’ knowledge of the lived body distinguishes dance therapy from other therapies.
This is exciting because, outside of academia and in the context of real life, the application of this knowledge base within therapy has the potential to support a lot of people. This form of therapy minimises the potential for splitting - both splitting from the experience of self and splitting from the experience of the present moment. The body is not an object and posture or gesture is not a representation of thought or belief. Rather, the body IS mind. Small wonder, then, that dance therapy has the potential to be helpful in the context of work with neurodivergence, trauma and eating disorders. For Lauffenburger, this therapy, with its implicit relational knowing, provides “a unique dynamic, fluid, non-verbal and enactive means for knowing the self and narrating identity.”
Although a typical session may not look any different to a regular session of talk therapy, elements of dance may be adapted and used in therapy, if and when a client welcomes this. This can support important aspects, such as being witnessed and validated, discovering, sharing and transforming stories, learning, externalising and making meaning.
However dance therapy is therapy, not teaching, not choreography and certainly not performance.
As with other arts therapies, the use of dance/the arts can support clients. Not only do they allow for expression beyond the reach of words but they also have concrete functions within therapeutic contexts. Koch articulated five of these: (1) pleasure and play, (2) beauty and authenticity, (3) non-verbal meaning making (communicating, being seen, symbolising social and transpersonal identity), (4) testing out actions (enactive transitional support) and (5) creativity and generativity (art for productivity, love, work, self-efficacy, leaving something behind) (Koch, 2017).
Dance therapists have their own range of artistic and therapeutic techniques in their toolbox; such as ritual/dance circles and relaxation techniques. Dance itself is an effective ‘complex intervention’. In therapy images and metaphors can emerge from words, sounds or movements, may be experienced through any of the senses and and are important for meaning. For Alperson, the experience of ‘sensed data’ – the ongoing bodily felt-flow of bodily sensations and feelings – translated into words brings insight and change. Creativity also has a wider function in dance therapy since fundamentally is about “playful and direct work with the inner and outer experience of change” and creativity is thus the “foundation of all therapeutic interaction” (Lauffenburger, 2020).
Therapy is said to be as much an art as a science. Dance movement therapists use traditional scientific outcome-focused research as well as their own embodied arts-based and participatory research methods to expand. Dance therapy has its own evidence-base for practice, including Cochrane reviews, meta-analyses and manuals.
Yet, ultimately, in the words of Alperson, we value both intuition and intellect and do not “treat them as polar opposites” (Alperson, 1977). An original “both/and” therapy.
