Yeats closes his poem, “Among School Children,” with the often-quoted phrase, ”How can we know the dancer from the dance?” It’s a Zen koan, a pause for inquiry––the eighth and final line of an eight-stanza poem. The number eight oriented sideways is a symbol of infinity. In middle eastern dance, prominent hip movements trace figure-eights. Dance can be a genre, a discipline, a metaphor, a performance art, a healing ritual, a way to worship, a way to release. In its essence, as Yeats suggests, there is mystery; and that mystery is intrinsically linked to the mystery of being human.
A good percentage of people believe that they can’t dance. Dance therapists hear this a lot; and our job is to meet a person where they are, find the nuances of their posture and presentation to engage with the non-verbal expressiveness that is already happening. The field of dance therapy is called dance/movement therapy, which I see as a user-friendly title. “Movement” is relatable and a less artistic term than “dance.” But we do ourselves a disservice if we minimize the power of human movement as well as its surprising artistry. I’d echo Yeats and wonder how we know the movement from the dance. In a staged dance piece, for instance, ordinary gestures are often included as well as pedestrian movement (like walking) and we accept these as part of the performance.
My graduating class in the dance therapy program at New York University created a performance piece based on the movements of hospitalized psychiatric patients. This was not an assignment. It was something we were inspired to do as interns and students, applying what we were learning about movement analysis. We were not mimicking or miming; we were revealing the dynamics of how these patients moved, or did not move, as well as how they coexisted and inhabited the confined space of the hospital units where we worked. Our staged piece proved to be an emotional powerhouse of a show, both for the audience and for us, the performers. We were tapping into a deeper level of empathy.
One of our primary texts for training at NYU was the book Body Movement: Coping with the Environment by Irmgard Bartenieff. The title says it all. However we move our bodies, we are in relation to an environment. We are constantly coping––and it shows, in subtle and more overt ways. There was a news story during the time of strict Covid restrictions about a professional dancer who worked at a grocery store while her usual performance schedule was on hold. She didn’t describe a loss of dance in her life. Instead, she described her fascination with the ensemble of customers moving through the aisles, reaching for objects, passing one another, orchestrating their shopping carts. This was choreography.
The global pandemic, which we may be reluctant to continue to spotlight, offers a heightened example of coping on a fundamental body level. How have each of us embodied this event? We’ve come so far in lifting of restrictions, freedom of movement, allowing for physical proximity, but what we’ve lived through has affected our nervous systems; and for those who lost loved ones, there is a greater toll. If we attend to the physiological responses to external events, even after, or long after, the occurrence of an event, we move toward that mystery Yeats presents. We seek to know our experience, while being the ones who are having the experience. We can’t step outside of ourselves to understand ourselves. We have to stay in the dance.
The Pine Cone Review 