What is dance therapy and what applications it can have with children

What is dance therapy and what applications it can have with children
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What is dance therapy and what applications it can have

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, each of us has been forced to overturn their certainties, to radically change their way of life, to lose contact with others. To protect ourselves from an invisible evil we have "closed ourselves" - even with ourselves - and now, when it seems that some glimmer may finally open, we are all a bit bewildered. Children and the very young have suffered more than others. There Clinical dance therapy, in this sense, it can become an opportunity to accompany children and adults to rediscover themselves and other people. But what is it about? And is it necessary to know how to dance to approach it?





We asked Laura Pezzenati, Dance Therapist and Training Director of Lyceum Academy in our city.

In this article

Origins of dance therapy

«The body - the expert begins - is the element that unites the emotion and the reason of each person. That's why since the dawn of time the dance it was a very strong channel for expressing emotions and impulses or to shape expectations and anxieties about future events ». And it is still a tool that externalizes our deepest and most visceral intimacy, especially in today's society which is guided by rationality: "In reality, up to 24 months we are only body and emotion; then rational competences begin to develop and gradually corporeality and "heart" fade into the background, also because of the scholastic courses that focus almost entirely on cognitive skills. We develop the mind thinking that it can do anything, and instead our body, with its boundaries, reminds us that as human beings we are limited».



Read also: Dance for children

What is dance therapy

Dance therapy aims just to be found a integrative and conscious modality between body, heart and mind "So that, faced with the hardships of life, a person does not find himself trying to correct his imbalances only with mental resources: it is these efforts that can lead to increasingly serious illnesses up to psychiatric pathologies". It is a second level therapy, which does not replace psychological therapy but which can be an alternative for those who cannot or do not want to face it; or to work on problems and existential situations of the person, even working only at the level of emotional and relational support. Or again, to act in a preventive form as a path of growth and self-knowledge, without clinical or therapeutic specificities.



Read also: Psychomotricity for children, what it is and what it is used for

History of dance therapy

Dance therapy in its broadest sense was born in United States in the XNUMXs as a therapy proposed by dancers who worked with disabilities and psychiatric distress. «Mothers of the discipline were modern dancers like Isadora Duncan (1877-1927), Martha Graham (1894-1991) e Marian Chase (1896-1970), who broke with the formalism of ballet to recover the "sacred" dimension of dance as a free expression of emotion and a means of communication between people, starting with the "simple" act of breathing ». In this sense, dance loses any character of performance and aesthetic and technical rigor and simply becomes a body that moves in space, time and in relation to myself and others: "They soon observed how much dance understood in this way did good to the body and soul of their patients and made it explicitly therapeutic with the birth of the first schools and the first studies, such as that of Rudolf von Laban (1879-1958) on the analysis of movement ».

Read also: Headband dance: how it works and what are the benefits for mothers and babies

Cases of application of dance therapy

All dance therapy, in its various forms, can be applied from 0 to 100 years old and, due to its non-performative character, it is not absolutely necessary to have the slightest experience in dance: «It is a transformative and relational experience in which everyone puts himself and not his own ability into play; and it can have different functions ».

  • Preventive. Aimed at children and adults without pathologies for the simple purpose of increasing their well-being.

  • Formative. In professional and adult training for team building and group dynamics, for educators or to work on leadership and authority.

  • Socio-educational / educational psychology. For the development of emotional and relational skills of children, adolescents, adults and the elderly (for example in the school environment).

  • Therapeutics. To support the rehabilitation of pathologies such as psychiatric or psychological problems, intellectual and physical disabilities, personality disorders, eating disorders, addictions (alcohol, drugs, food, sex, play).

In particular the methodology of clinical dance therapy - which integrates the work of the Argentine dancer Maria Fux - works, in fact, by fielding a gaze that focuses on the creative and vital resources, as well as on the limits and deficits of people, outside of performative and choreographic areas. And with able-bodied children, for example, at school, you can activate specific paths to prevent and fight bullying, which work on the class group at a relational level and focusing on mutual acceptance and absence of judgment.

How a Clinical Dance Therapy session takes place

«In Clinical Dance Therapy the therapist is above all an observer with a welcoming and non-judgmental gaze. He respects what the person at that moment wants or manages to express and does not force, but he proposes and makes available stimulus tools ». A meeting can be individual or in homogeneous groups or heterogeneous by age and condition and takes place as follows:

  1. Tuning. THEThe dance therapist tunes in with the participants: the goal in this phase is to acknowledge and accept the starting condition. “If I feel tired, I don't aim to wake you up or give you energy. My proposals for now must be neutral warm-up activities, like a simple walk inside the space ».

  2. Proposal. Subsequently, the therapist evaluates what space of experience can be accepted by the participants and proposes it. It can be the exploration of a quality of the body (or heart) of the moment. "We offer frames of meaning, within which the person will act, as he can and wishes, at that moment."

The frames of meaning, which clinical dance therapy calls imaginative stimuli, are made up of:

  • Mother words. they are kinetic words, not didactic ones, which speak to the body and heart, with which imaginative stimuli are proposed. «They don't suggest what to do, but they propose metaphors: we are clouds, butterflies, waves…».

  • Music. "For us music is not a background, but an organic stimulus consistent with the proposal: if for example the input is" we are clouds ", the music will be aerial and give the idea of ​​lightness".

  • Stimulus objects. Crepe paper, rubber bands, balloons… these are materials that support imaginative stimuli and want to be mediators of the qualities of the body and of the relational possibilities between person and person. «An elastic, for example, by its nature, creates tension, and if one pulls, the other releases. or not…. the therapist does not suggest to one to try to pull or to the other to let go, he just observes what happens ».

The number of meetings depends on the work to be set up, but normally they are no less than 10 (usually 1 hour a week) so that the right climate of trust can be established between participants and between them and the therapist.

Read also: My child wants to dance, how do I behave?

How to become a dance therapist

That of the dance therapist is one professional figure, regulated by Law 4/2022, increasingly valued within public or private educational, welfare and socio-health structures. In Del Paese there are a number of schools recognized by theAPID (Professional Association of the Paesena Danzamovimentoterapeuti) which in quality are comparable to European and US standards. In particular, to the Three-year training in Clinical Dance Therapy three-year graduates (Psychology, Medicine, Educational Sciences, Letters and Philosophy or the Social-Health sector), graduates from Dance Schools comparable to a three-year period or teachers of Dance and Theater Dance can access. It consists of 1450 teaching hours plus an internship, at the end of which the graduate can enroll in the National Professional Register.

The interviewee

Laura Pizzenati è Education Director of Lyceum, Association and Qualified Training and Refresher Body at the MIUR, which has been operating in our city since 1999. Lyceum Academy has to its credit three professional training: Clinical Art and Dance Therapy (three-year) and Experiential Art Workshops (annual), recognized by the respective Professional Associations. In addition to these it offers different types of short courses.

TAG:
  • dance
  • dance and little girls
  • dance for children
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