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.
3rd EADMT Conference – 2018 / Crossing Borders and the In~Between
“It takes courage to stand where we stand simply as we stand”.
Bani Shorter Jungian Analyst ‘Border People’ 1982
As Dance Movement Therapists (DMTs) we are all border-people and we work in liminal spaces, on edges, on borders and with people of all ages and cultures in transition from illness to wellness. The numbers of people crossing inner and outer national borders at this time are quite unprecedented, giving many opportunities for us to rise to these new challenges in skilled, embodied and psychotherapeutically informed ways. This stimulating conference in the heart of Athens, will address both the inner and outer border crossings that we do in ourselves and with others in the course of our therapeutic work on a variety of themes. It will also offer an opportunity to share and celebrate some of the most innovative and important DMT work going on throughout Europe and globally, at a time of profound change and also opportunity.
It is significant that this year’s conference is so close to the migration routes used by refugees and asylum seekers fleeing torture, war and ethnic cleansing. It is also of great significance that ΦΙΛΟΞΕΝΙΑ in traditional Greek culture is about taking action by ‘being a friend to the stranger’. Might this idea also be true of the DMT as friend to the stranger, working with and through trauma, up-rooting, identity-loss and trans-cultural issues in DMT? What are the underlying issues of theory and practice that inform work in this area? What are the outcomes or results? To what extent is this work extending, developing and also challenging us as DMTs? How might further work in this area grow and develop? These questions inform this theme which is designed to open up dialogue and give a platform in our community about issues of major societal concern.
As DMTs we are all border people meaning that we work in liminal spaces, on edges, at borders and with people of all ages and cultures in transition from illness to wellness. This theme takes a seminal work by Jungian Analyst B. Shorter (1982) as its inspiration, which highlighted the importance of a border as not only a place of transition, but also a place where you are investigated by way of your passport or your identity, and that existing permanently on borders is not healthy, as there exists a ‘no man’s land’ in that place. A place that is neither here nor there, that exists paradoxically both in and out of time. We as DMTs work in this territory, in the space between the ‘known’ and the ‘not yet known’, we work in the present moment with the person in the context of the ‘therapeutic relationship’ (Chaiklin & Schmais, 1986). This theme also includes transitions in life, coming to terms with a different sense of who we are becoming, whether caused by illness, by disability, by ageing and/or a mental health problem. In addition, there are also major societal concerns such as oncology, neuro-degeneration (including dementia syndrome and parkinson’s), psychiatric and substance abuse issues and medically unexplained symptoms.
Technology today in video and digital form makes it feasible to cross the border from working in real to virtual/cyberspace. Immediately a question arises about how technology contradicts or not one of the pillars of DMT, which is embodiment: the teaching of, bringing awareness to, assessing body language? Is it a contradiction to use technology in our profession or where does it function and work well and in what particular areas? Importantly, what effect has it produced? We create and use webinars and learning for training, clinical practice and in giving or receiving supervision. The skills knowledge and experience we apply in our work, puts us in a unique position in relation to “psyche” and the ‘therapeutic relationship’ (Chaiklin & Schmais, 1986) whether in real or virtual form. How does the use of cyberspace help us navigate border crossings? What are the ethical issues which arise, and how do we work with them in these liminal and in-between spaces?
References:
Shorter, B (1982) ‘Border People’, The Guild of Pastoral Psychology, Guild Papers, Lecture No: 211
Chaiklin, S, and C. Schmais, eds. (1986) ‘The Chace Approach to Dance Therapy’, in Bernstein, P., ed. Eight Theoretical Approaches in Dance-Movement Therapy, Dubuque, USA: Kendall/Hunt
Beardall, N. et al (2016) Creating the online body: Educating dance/movement therapists using a low-residency model. American Journal of Dance Therapy, 38(2), 407-428
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.
EADMT Board: Vincenzo Puxeddu President, Imke Fiedler Secretary, Shirley Mawer Treasurer, Julia Morozova Communications & PR
Coordinator: Julia Morozova
Members: Amanda Kougioufa (GADT), Marcia Plevin, Dr Richard Coaten & Rosa Maria Rodriguez-Jimenes
Co-ordinator: Rosa Maria Rodriguez-Jimenez, Universidad Europea di Madrid, Rosemarie Samaritter
Greek Association of Dance Therapy (GADT)
GADT Board: Zoe Chatzidaki President, Amanda Kougioufa Vice President, Erasmia Perdiou Treasurer, Tonia Dakou Secretary General, Ioanna Koutiva Deputy Secretary General
Coordinator: Amanda Kougioufa
Members: Tonia Dakou, Eleni Tzikou & Volunteers: Evropi Stavropoulou, Natasa Smyrli,Andrianna Avdi, Afroditi Ntrismpioti,Konstantia Stavrou, Lila Theologia Pitta, Marilena Karetta, Maria- Anna Vlachou,Myrto Vagianu Zarokosta,Stella Kolyvopoulou
Nina Alcalay, Theodora Thatcher, Alexia Margariti, Amanda Kougioufa, Adda Paizi, Elli Kita, Georgia Aroni, Shirley Mawer, Imke Fiedler, Julia Morozova, Vincenzo Puxeddu, Marcia Plevin, Richard Coaten, Rosa Maria Rodriguez, Suzi Tortora
CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS CLOSED
The conference aims to promote communication and diversification of ideas and practice between the Dance Movement Therapy community and other disciplines in order to learn and grow from mutual exchange.
The conference Scientific Committee invites the submission of research papers of excellent quality in all areas related to the sub-themes. Authors with original research are encouraged to submit contributions related to:
We invite DMT researchers and practitioners to present their work and enter into discussion and reflection with colleagues throughout the conference.
Authors are advised to ensure their contribution meets the criteria and guidelines below. All contributions will be submitted to a double-blind review for:
The committee will also take into consideration:
Acceptance for contribution in the programme and assignment to a session are determined solely by the Scientific Committee based on a review of the paper and its subject matter. Decisions of the Scientific Committee are final.
Submitting authors are required to ensure that all listed co-authors have reviewed the abstract, take responsibility for its content and agree with being listed as co-author.
Following the double-blind review, authors of accepted papers will be asked to submit their final version. The Scientific Committee will inform the authors about decision
Please note: by final version is meant – the same proposal, revised version with the names of the authors and corrections recommended by reviewers , NOT the final text of your presentation.
1) Oral Presentation – 20 minutes
The standard format for oral presentations are 20 minutes in length.
2) Poster Presentation – 10 minutes
Poster sessions give participants a chance to network with other delegates who may be interested in similar research or other disciplines.
Content: Title; Author(s); Introduction; Finalities and objectives; Description; Results; Discussion and Conclusions; References
The dimensions of a poster are as standard – 70 x 100 cm or A0 format 84.1 x 118.9 cm
3) Workshop Presentation – 60 to 90 minutes
A workshop is an intensive experiential session lasting 60 to 90 minutes led by an experienced practitioner.
Your proposal should be submitted at with the following:
Personal details (to specify)
Name / Surname / Address / Email / Phone contact / Profession /Place of work or study
Type of contribution
Oral / Poster /Workshop
Title of contribution
Abstract (150 words)
The proposal document in pdf-format should be attached with the following:
The title of contribution. the proposal will undergo double-blind review process, so the names of authors and the names of institutions should NOT be included in this document
Oral and Poster presentation proposals ( max. 800 words) must include: introduction, objectives, methodology, results, conclusions and references (no more than 5 in APA format). Remember that Poster presentation requires a synthesis, so avoid lengthy text and give more importance to graphics, drawings and/or tables to show your results.
Workshop proposals ( max. 800 words) must include: introduction, learning objectives, methodology, structure of the workshop and references. Maximum 5 recent publications or conferences.
Equipment needed: DVD player, amplifier and Iphone cable, Power-point facilities, materials for workshop.
Max. number of participants needed please.
You can register online by filling in one of these registration forms.
Individual Registration Form
Delegate/Deputy Delegate Registration Form
Presenter/Reviewer Registration Form
Student Registration Form
Group Registration Form
GADT Member Registration Form
Individual registration fees
Before June 1, 2018 – 200,00 €
From June 2 to July 30, 2018 – 220,00 €
From July 31, 2018 – 250,00 €
Registration fees for Groups at least 10 pp.(a 10% discount has been applied)
Per person before June 1, 2018 – 180,00 €
Per person from June 2 to July 30, 2018 – 198,00 €
Per person from July 31, 2018 – 225,00 €
Registration fees students (a 15% discount has been applied)
Before June 1, 2018 – 170,00 €
From June 2 to July 30, 2018 – 187,00 €
From July 31, 2018 – 212,00 €
Presenter/reviewer registration fees (a 15% discount has been applied)
Before June 1, 2018 – 170,00 €
From June 2 to July 30, 2018 – 187,00 €
From July 31, 2018 – 212,00 €
Registration fee Members GADT (a 15% discount has been applied)
Before June 1, 2018 – 170,00 €
From June 2, 2018 onwards – 187,00 €
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.