What is Dance Movement Therapy (DMT)?
DMT is defined by the European Association Dance Movement Therapy (EADMT) as ‘the therapeutic use of movement to further the emotional, cognitive, physical, spiritual and social integration of the individual.
Resilience is the process of ‘bouncing back’ from difficult experiences, adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress. Resilience can be learned and developed in anyone. Research shows that it is an ordinary trait in humans and people commonly demonstrate resilience every day. Supportive relationships within and outside the family are important factors in resilience. Evidence of resilience is further demonstrated by a person, or community, having:
Building resilience is a personal journey and is reflected in cultural differences and using diverse strategies.
“The creative force belongs equally to the space of reality and the realm of fantasy”
Mary Wigman
EADMT took a view of the Dance Movement Therapy profession and community across Europe and beyond, and identified in the early 21st century that the many faces of current adversity require resilience as practitioners, educators, researchers and administrators. The EADMT, by hosting this conference with the theme of Resilience, aims to provide a basis for future collaboration and communication across the continent. EADMT encourages the profession to recognise and have confidence in its strengths and particular abilities, and to robustly engage and communicate with the wider scientific world. Change is always with us; we must learn to embrace the challenges that meet us in our work places, amongst colleagues, across disciplines, and view them as positive encouragement to think and work even more creatively. As a profession and as a DMT community we must take a fresh look at our goals and take decisive actions to realise them. Such action requires working together towards common goals, utilising the individual strengths we bring to the table to create a powerful whole. Working in collaboration gives us strength to nurture an increasing positive identity of others and ourselves.
“Dance is a living language that is spoken by people and speaks of people!”
Mary Wigman
When we work with clients, this is the very epicenter of our focus – developing personal resources to ‘bounce back’, re-align themselves, extend their vision to a wider perspective and reach out. Bouncing also requires flexibility – the ability to sway in the wind of change without being blown over or feel the need to stick rigidly to the known. The papers and workshops this weekend offer conference delegates the opportunity to explore beyond their usual territory, to engage with others who are talking the ‘same language’, be inspired by innovative practice and above all, make new friends with whom we can gain and offer support on our ongoing personal journey.
Susan Scarth&AntonellaMonteleone
Inspired by the American Psychological Association’s definition of Resilience, and who permit EADMT to cite extracts.
Road to Resilience found on www.apa.org/helpcenter/road-resilience.aspx#
Roz Carroll is a registered body psychotherapist (UKCP) and an associate member of ADMP. An evolving interdisciplinary understanding of embodiment has been central to her work as a psychotherapist, supervisor, trainer and writer. She has been in ongoing Authentic Movement groups for over thirty years. She taught on the M.A. in Integrative Psychotherapy at The Minster Centre for 14 years and has been a regular speaker at Confer.co.uk for twenty years. She was a founding co-editor in 2005 of the Journal of Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy. With Jon Blend, she developed Witnessed Improvised Diaspora Journey Enactments (WIDGE): an approach to working with therapists on embodied memories of intergenerational trauma. Her numerous writings include: ‘The Blood-dimmed Tide: Witnessing War and Working with the Collective Body in Authentic Movement’ in the Journal of Psychotherapy and Politics International (2015); and chapters in Embodied Approaches to Supervision (2022), What is Normal? (2020), Talking Bodies (2014), and more.
Title: In Time, Out of Time or Beyond Time?
Abstract:
Time is circular. Circadian rhythms and turning seasons shape the cycle of life.
Time is linear. Forward-thrusting organisation wants structure, progress, and a quick tango through a long list of things to do. In evolutionary terms, modernity brings a new kind of time, a fixed metric that can be – and increasingly is – disconnected from nature. Time is relational. We interact in subtle symphonies synchronising and de-sychronising with others. Time is joyful. We feel the beat of mutual embodied rhythms. Time is traumatic. We cannot find connection with the other or with ourselves.
Now we face an exponential growth in technology, radical social change and climate crisis. What are the consequences for the embodiment of our species of these developments? How can we – should we? – adapt to this changing pace?
President Elect of the American Dance Therapy Association(ADTA)
2019 Recipient of the ADTA Lifetime Achievement Award , and 2009 Marian Chace Keynote Speaker, former Associate Professor and founding Director of the NYU Graduate Dance Movement Therapy Program and founder of the first European DMT Programs in Stockholm, Sweden and in London at Roehampton University. Founded DMT training programs in Argentina, Australia , China, Greece , Japan and Turkey. Former Board member of ADTA and former Co-Editor of the Journal. A former professional dancer, actor, choreographer and Director having performed in numerous film, theatre and television both throughout Europe and the USA, and was a founding member of the Action Theatre of Paris and also trained in the Professional Actor’s training program at the National Theatre in London. Doctorate is in Clinical Psychology. Wrote the first research Master’s Thesis on DMT worldwide (UCLA). Besides training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Gestalt Therapy with Laura Perls and Psychosynthesis, has trained and studied alternative healing traditions worldwide. Clinical practice have included Special Populations of children and adolescents, Frail Elderly, Juvenile offenders, and incarcerated male inmates. Maintains a private practice in Los Angeles, California. Current clinical practice which focuses upon DMT as a primary Psychotherapy includes Trauma, Mindfulness, and various meditation and Shamanic practices integrated with DMT. Numerous awards and recognition for her innovative work in DMT by NYC Board of Education, Greece, Australia and Turkey.
Title: Journey to the Heart of Matter ; Healing and Becoming———keeping myself relevant and centered in this time of chaos, crises and community upheavals
Abstract: Who am I? How am I? And where am I now? ; remembering and restoring as I extend and unfold. How I am able to stay grounded in my unique authenticity as boundaries shift and change rapidly; globally, personally and professionally, brings me back to remembering my connection to the Conscious Healing Dance ™. I again remember all it is able to offer one in finding meaning and sustainability through this time of upheaval and chaos.
What strategies work for me which support my being able to stay present, hold , and be witness to , not only my Client’s and Communities dissembling, creating grief and trauma, but my own as well?
As I become present to and hold for my own change imperatives, I unfold and extend to even more potential in my self-evolution. In exploring with full, non-critical judgment a brief 3 D outline of a choreographic direction, I am able to explore my next steps in this healing/holing journey. I then have the chance to return to my life as catalyst – healer, refreshed, re- connected, restored.
Studied DMT in Canada, CAT in Switzerland and did her doctorate on DMT in Germany. Teaching Therapist, Trainer, Supervisor BTD, European Certificate of Psychotherapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapist, KMP notator, author of over 70 articles and book chapters, co-editor of the German journal for body psychotherapy and creative arts therapies „körper-tanz-bewegung”. Co-Principal of the Langen Institute for Dance Therapy, Düsseldorf for 35 years. Currently a lecturer and researcher at the German Sport University, Cologne and the University of Fine Art, Dresden. Over 35 years of experience in clinical institutions for psychiatry, psychosomatics, psychotherapy, and in corporate health management, her current private practice specializes in trauma-related disorders.
Title: From the magnifying glass to the camera lens to the telescope:
Changing perspectives in a changing world
Abstract: To attune us to the themes of the conference we will move from small scale (individual experience) to large scale (global connection) perspectives. First, our focus will be on rupture and repair as a central process in human development and the therapeutic relationship – moving from close to far and back again. How did this process evolve in the wake of the pandemic and the introduction of online formats of therapy and teaching? Next we will look at the phenomenon of boundaries that constitutes identity and belonging but also exclusion. This theme leads us to the development of the EADMT itself, expanding its boundaries within Europe and beyond. How do we negotiate the closeness of similarity and the distance of difference? In closing, we will consider how choreographing the new world confronts us with a flux of human challenges that call for specific interventions. Is there lasting knowledge to be accumulated, or must we cast old ideas to the wind, when the winds change? What are the constants, upon which we can depend in times of uncertainty?
Langen Institute, Dance Movement Therapist, trainer and supervisor; Lecturer and Researcher, German University of Sport, Department of neurology & psychosomatic psychiatry, Köln, Germany
To make it clear: I am definitely for interdisciplinary pathways, there are just many things we have to consider on our way. I would like to discuss things such as:
Then I would discuss which disciplines offer us chances, what these might be and how we can use them in research and practice.
Full Professor of Physiology, Department of Neuroscience, University of Parma, Italy; Adjunct Research Scholar, Department of Art History and Archaeology, Columbia University, New York, USA
The discovery of a mirror mechanism for action, emotions and sensations suggested an embodied approach to simulation – Embodied Simulation (ES). ES provides a new empirically based notion of intersubjectivity, viewed first and foremost as intercorporeity. ES challenges the notion that Folk Psychology is the sole account of interpersonal understanding. Before and below mind reading is intercorporeity as the main source of knowledge we directly gather about others. By means of ES we do not just “see” an action, an emotion, or a sensation and then understand it through an inference by analogy. By means of ES we can map others’ actions by re-using our own motor representations, as well as others’ emotions and sensations by re-using our own viscero-motor and somatosensory representations. ES provides an original and unitary account of basic aspects of intersubjectivity, demonstrating how deeply our making sense of others’ living and acting bodies is rooted in the power of re-using our own motor, emotional and somatosensory resources. The notion that a theoretical meta-representational approach to the other is the sole/main key to intersubjectivity will be challenged and a second-person approach to intersubjectivity will be proposed.
Full Professor of Moral Phylosophy and Phylosophical Practices, Department of Human Sciences, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicoca, Italy
In the Liber Secundus of Jung’s Red Book we listen to the dialogue between the I and the Red One, the Devil. This personal devil is an ancient, good-mannered horseman, whose role would have been to teach dancing and joy to the stiff personalità of the I. In a more ironic sense it reminds Nietzsche’s Zarathustra admonishment to the Higher Men to overcome the spirit of gravity. But the real dancer didn’t agree with this spirit of lightness: “Now I will dance you the war, with its suffering, with its destruction, with its death.
The war which you did not prevent and so you are responsible for”. So said Nijinsky during his last ballet in St. Moritz at the end of the First World War.
Nijinsky ended up crushed by madness but that does not detract from the strength of his invective and his prophecy. In many ways, today we can look at the decades that followed the Second World War as the illusion of exiting the century of world wars. As the pope says there is a new kind of world war, world war in pieces.
If the world outside is torn between hostile countries, ethnic groups, classes, genders, political power struggles, the world inside will be deeply affected, and vice versa. Dancing with the opposite side, the dance of the opposites, might be a good metaphor because dance means a possibility of approach the other and the other side, tests the consistency of agreement and disagreement, seduces or resists seduction. In every case dance is the enactment of a relationship and doing so it provides for a chance to mindfulness.
Elena Mignosi is Professor in General and Social Pedagogy at the University of Palermo where she teaches Theories, strategies and education system; Expressive-body languages methodologies and techniques; Body Pedagogy; Pedagogy of music. She has a degree in Family therapy and she is dance-movement therapist APID.
She has a long experiences on training of trainers, educational and social workers in various contexts.
About DMT, she has written numerous books and articles, among which: La danzamovimento terapia nella formazione dei formatori (2008); La Danza Movimento Terapia nella prevenzione del disagio esistenziale dei giovani adulti (2010); Per una valutazione qualitativa nella mediazione corporea (2012); Se raconter à travers la dansemouvement-thérapie: un parcours de formation pour des jeunes futurs formateurs (2016); Dance Movement Therapy in Educational Training for Intercultural Experiences (2017)
Beginning with the concept of “mediation” in general, Elena Mignosi will deal with the theme of “intercultural mediation”. She will focus on the non-verbal and creative aspects which characterise this mediation. Reflecting on the professional skills that are necessary in this process of mediation how does DMT makes a difference? She will draw inspiration from her training experiences with professionals who have been faced with emergency situations sometimes in very complex social contexts.
Elena is from Sicily the region that receives 85% of the unaccompanied foreign minors arriving in Italy, a country that does not have adequate laws in place to favour life projects and social inclusion. In her opinion certain DMT competences can offer the possibility to build bridges between people and to create social networks, reaching out, as well, towards political change.
Dr Marina Rova is a dance movement psychotherapist, trainer and researcher based in London, UK. Specialist clinical populations include older adults and dementia services, adult mental health and perinatal and family services. She holds a practice-based PhD on kinaesthetic empathy combining the fields of dance movement psychotherapy, phenomenology and cognitive neuroscience. She is passionate about developing embodied practice interventions within research and service development for the health sector and community interest projects. She is also involved in independent consultancy work delivering bespoke training offering specific guidance in embodied reflective practice.
As a Greek who emigrated to the UK, a dance movement psychotherapist working in diverse clinical settings and a researcher developing novel approaches towards embodied knowledge production, Dr Marina Rova has been crossing borders for 20 years. Building on autobiographical, clinical and research insights Dr Rova will discuss borders not only as places of definition of otherness but as potential spaces for transformation. Her paper will propose interdisciplinarity as an important approach to fostering dialogic process and thus a form of reconciliation and integration.
DMT is defined by the European Association Dance Movement Therapy (EADMT) as ‘the therapeutic use of movement to further the emotional, cognitive, physical, spiritual and social integration of the individual.