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.
Growing as one academic body,
Different organs / supporting / enabling each other / in unison.
Drawing, breaching, maintaining borders.
Separating / neighboring / living-together-with.
The sensing body / absorbed in the already existing / long before this academic body.
Reaching out / over the borders / to make a difference.
/ Bordering. /
To explore how our body movements express the embodied entanglement of our bodies with societal norms and current structures. To think through examples of how our bodies are constantly becoming through breaking and maintaining those structures.
How to act differently in relation to prevailing, embodied power relations, particularly those surrounding ecology, inequality, othering, responsibility, self-preservation, and collectivity?
The examples in our chapter showed some angle of how thinking–feeling–moving–sensing are tied together and how tuning into these experiences was already the beginning of a transformation in our thinking. In our moments of realisation, we all learned something about ourselves and our habitual ways of relating within our connections to the broader structures of our cultural environment and about the ways those structures emerged in our bodies. Our chapter highlights the importance of the self-reflective recognition of how the norms of our culture and acceptable ways of behaving were expressed in our bodily practices in order to guide our own transformative body movements in a more sustainable direction with respect to others.
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.