'Calling Out Around the World': Dancing Adds a New Dimension to Psychotherapy

"During one dance therapy session, a young man suddenly smiled and said, 'If I could have kept moving, I would not have had to be sick.'"

In the narrow ward of the mental hospital, patients' total silence or hallucinatory cries are broken--and in the interlude the body and its movements are rediscovered.

The patient learns to know his body and through his body can learn to know himself. He learns to relate to others through non-verbal communication. A new technique has been added to the ordinary mental hospital repertoire--dance therapy. With each simple movement, layers of frustrations can be slowly removed until a patient can look honestly at himself and then at others.

Dance therapy alone is not a cure. But it is often valuable in a mental hospital's rehabilitation program, which is aimed at a person's healthy return to society. Patients who do not talk often begin to react to those around them through dance. Through body movements, emotionally disturbed persons begin to acquire a sense of self.

Dance therapy was started in 1942 by Marian Chance at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. Formerly a professional dancer with the Denishawn troupe, Miss Chace began to give lessons in the Washington area in the thirties. Finding that dancing was emotionally calming to her patients, she began in 1942 working with patients at St. Elizabeth's. In 25 years, Miss Chace developed dance therapy into a professionally recognized treatment and made St. Elizabeth's the nation's center for dance therapy.

Miss Chace enters a ward where isolated patients sit idly around unaware of others or refusing to recognize them. Her goal is to free the patients from their tightly constructed defenses through dance--to emerge from their separation into a unified dancing group. Starting the record player, usually with a restful waltz, she asks each patient to dance with the group. The most difficult part of the job is recruiting the first few patients.

A patient is never forced to dance, Sometimes inviting gestures are employed. Sometimes a patient is won over by the group leader's sensitive response to his mood. In one session Miss Chace approached a woman who was shouting that people were sticking pins into her backside. The dance therapist, assuming the patient's indignant mood, countered that it must be good for her--or else they wouldn't do it--and that dancing would be good for her too. Would she join them? She did.

Miss Chace tries to stimulate a satisfying physical exercise, to encourage patients to express their feelings in easy dance movements, and to develop their sense of self through an awareness of their own bodies.

In the beginning, the exercise of each part of the body--willing toes, clenching fists, stretching necks--is encouraged. When the patients feel limber and responsive to music, she explains perhaps that Argentine girls are taught to stand straight and tall, with shoulders back and heads high. She then asks if the patients would like to pretend their are Argentines.

Miss Chace encourages patients to break away from the group and to dance alone or in small groups. When she dances alone with a patient, she tries to adopt his mood. Joining a woman who was making broad bending movements and said she was scrubbing. Miss Chase started scrubbing too. The woman caught the dance therapist by the waist and the two moved up and down together, closer and closer to the floor. Just before the large housewife began to crush the therapist, the patient stood up, immensely relieved. Open expression, Miss Chace explained, had begun--the woman was admitting her hatred of housework.

The rhythm and feeling of these sessions is so strong that even those patients who choose to sit and watch can still feel a part of the group. One woman who had watched for weeks began dancing. Miss Chace expressed pleasure that the woman had joined them. Very reproachful, the patient said that she had been with them for a long time--she was simply "stronger" now.

Certainly the physical exercise of the sessions is good for the patients. But dance therapy sessions have positive psychological benefits as well.

Often mental patients do not talk at all, because they feel that speech has led them to traumatic experiences. For them, most conventional forms of psychotherapy are impossible. In dance therapy, the patient frequently begin to re-establish communication on a non-verbal level.

Disturbed people are often wary of being touched. But in dance this barrier can be broken down naturally. Patients can express themselves easily by dancing in therapy sessions. The non-verbal communication thus established with a sensitive therapist often leads to a renewal of verbal communication with the patient. At that point, psychotherapy can begin.

Some of the patients are not fully aware of the very existence of their own bodies. The directed exercise of parts of the body in therapy sessions helps to develop this awareness. During one dance period, a young woman suddenly stretched upward and said, "I can feel myself. Now I can be with the rest of you." A crucial sense of self was developing.

Above all the dance therapy sessions make patients feel that they are accomplishing something. "The main thing is that you can't do anything wrong," one therapist said.

With progress in these areas, a patient becomes more ready to work in a group.

Out of a woman's dance group at St. Elizabeth's grew a hospital-wide musical production. "St. Elizabeth's Hotel," a satire on hospital life. For the show, the patients parodied a number of songs, including "You're Just in Love." They wrote.

I hear voices and there's no one there,

I see visions floating in the air,

I have nightmares in the daylight glare,

I wonder why, I wonder why,

Schizophrenia is new to me,

I'm a double personality,

Doctors say one's enough for me,

I wonder why, I wonder why. . . .

A year later, in 1955, the dance group directed the writing and producing of a pageant about the life of Dorthea Lynde Dix. Miss Dix, famous for her campaigns to improve treatment of the mentally ill, was instrumental in the federal government's founding of St. Elizabeth's a century before.

Miss Chace was instrumental in the development of techniques of dance therapy. Recently institutionalized in the form of the American Dance Therapy Association, dance therapy is now used throughout the country. But each therapist, usually a dancer herself, has individualized methods of dealing with a group of the mentally ill.

The techniques of dance therapy are also used to establish communication with physically handicapped and mentally retarded children and adults.

Under a grant from the Radcliffe Institute, Griselda W. Stoney, a dance therapist, works in the children's unit of the Metropolitan State Hospital in Boston.

Mrs. Stoney was originally a professional ballet dancer. She gave up performing because of what she felt was a lack of communication between the dancer and the audience. After college and graduate school in painting and art history, she began studying modern dance.

Teaching dance in several private New England girls' schools, Mrs. Stoney realized the possibilities of what she termed "the expression of, feeling through movement." She then took "the course in dance therapy, Miss Chace's summer session at the Turtle Bay Music School in New York.

At Metropolitan State, Mrs. Stoney helps children to express themselves in all of the creative arts. She places herself somewhere between a teacher and a therapist. "A teacher hangs up her subject with her coat when she comes into the room," Mrs. Stoney said. "She always keeps sight of that subject. But she's mainly working with disturbed children."

Forms of dance therapy are used throughout the Boston area--the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, McLean Hospital, the South Shore Mental Health Clinic in Quincy, and in the special education program for exceptional children in the Newton schools.

Dance therapy recognizes the disturbed person's need to express himself and his frequent inability to do so verbally. It is such a promising form of therapy because it draws on the natural ability to move the body in response to emotions.

During one dance therapy session, a young man suddenly smiled and said, "If I could have kept moving, I should not have had to be sick.