Dance Art Therapy
Beyond dance, there are different types of art therapies according to your natural inclinations and with the advice of an art therapist. You can use different artistic expressions including the visual arts, working with painting, clay, drawing, and even on the sand, using colour and shapes. The work through a non-verbal activity uses a space of silence where inner change can take place when one’s creativity is awakened. Working with the hands allows artistic expression of one’s inner self and gives the symbolic meaning of colours, shapes or graphic signs, etc. Other artistic means are found also in theatre that communicate through the body and voice portraying different characters; telling stories that touch various parts of oneself. The ability to play, move and improvise is good even as an adult who does not remember how to do it. In my work, the experiences proposed are dance and movement, voice and clay, painting and drawing.
Dance Art Therapy, who is it for?
Do you have difficulties with self esteem?
Are you facing difficulties with a big transition in life?
Do you have difficulty in expressing your emotions?
Are you feeling low with a sense of depression?
How is in relationship to yourself and others?
Do you feel restless and have a desire to bring change to your life?
Dance Movement Therapy
Dance Movement Therapy, is a therapeutic technique which is aimed not only at the expression of the self, but above all, it is a practice to move the creative resources inherent in each human being with the objective of creating a synergy between body, mind and soul. The ultimate aim is therefore to increase the well-being of the subject, both from a personal point of view and from a relational and social perspective.
Originally the Dance Movement Therapy was born and developed in the United States, to then cross the American borders and be received practically in every part of the world, with the typical approaches and orientations of each country.
Dance Movement Therapy with psychodynamic orientation finds its primary construct in several studies carried out in the 1940s among which, those of the dancer Marian Chace, who began to practice dance as a therapeutic tool in hospitals working with subjects with mental disorders. Still, important were the studios of Mary Whitehouse and Trudy Schoop, also operating in the USA with a varied audience. This knowledge, which was also finding the support and comfort of medicine, then developed in the following period, and in particular in the 60s and 70s.
Dance Movement Therapy, while enriched by the constructs of depth psychology that draws its deepest origin from ancient traditions (including shamanic ones) which saw precisely in this practice a way to achieve well-being and full awareness of oneself.
Through movement, what was essentially needed and still wanted today, is to integrate the different parts of the self, from a psychophysical but also social point of view. It is currently used in various fields, and is based on the close relationship that exists (or rather should be recovered) between mind, body and soul. …
The interesting aspect of DMT is in accordance with the psychodynamic theories that were emerging especially the new vision of the person and his illness. We no longer dwell on illness as an organic impediment, but rather on the symptom as an expression of an imbalance that can be realigned by passing through the body. The strength of DMT lies in having combined therapy with creativity, so that the same bodily and expressive process can act as a cure.
The Dance Movement Therapy Symbolic method® conceived by Paola de Vera d’Aragona, is a therapeutic intervention model that finds its origins in different constructs. The first is the Jungian one of Archetype, Symbol and Image. As for the Archetype, this can be referred to as the original form. Basically it is about what man tells in his peculiar characteristics and information. Think, for example, of the representations of the feminine expressed by the Great Mother. Although the depictions themselves may also be different from each other, what they narrate (therefore the Archetype) always remains the same, in this case precisely the concept of feminine. The form expresses a content, to such an extent that even by changing the form the content, and therefore what it represents, remains unchanged.
The Symbol, as Jung himself says, is the image of a content that for the most part transcends consciousness. We therefore have a content that has to image itself in order to show itself. Finally, the image is inextricably linked to both the Archetype and the Symbol, because both are basically images. The specific image is the form, that is, what the first two express themselves through. Another point of reference for DMT Symbolic Method® is Maslow’s Transpersonal Psychology, that is, the one that leads us to the realisation of our Self. This is an approach that contextualises spiritual experiences in the psychological field.
Still, we can rediscover the thought of Ken Wilber and his integral psychology, as well as that of Ziegler and Archetypal Medicine. It can be said that all these influences are based on the assumption that, in psychosomatic terms, the unconscious decends in bodily terms as well as in psychic ones.
So the body, through movement, expresses a dynamic language that expresses the interior through a symbolic form. If we consider the body in its symbolism, we can identify it as a set of apparatuses and organs that guard the Archetypes, which in turn can be considered as “somatic universal entities that are placed in that eternal present in which they reign, woven from the analogue, the Myth, the Fairy Tale and the Rite” The same disease therefore becomes a sort of “mitologem”, that is “a fabulous story that indicates the original nucleus of a myth”, of ritual theme.
Therefore, every function of the body can be indicated as a state of consciousness that although it could be unconscious always remains present. The disease would therefore be an attempt to tell, on the part of the individual, his personal story. He would do this through the seperation of those parts that are saturated with emotionality and that in this way can live autonomously. In therapy, therefore, space is given to these narratives, giving the aforementioned parts a voice through which the body can tell its message.
Thus the DMT Symbolic Method® applies to psychosomatic pathology, psychiatric pathology, as well as psychological distress in the different areas of rehabilitation, in the socio-educational and in that of prevention.
In essence, DMT when interpreted in a symbolic key®, allows us to attribute a symbolic meaning to the parts of the body and the way we move in space. For example, you can observe the way weight is distributed over the body and with respect to the body, assuming that the body itself can be hypothetically and virtually divided into portions.
When one part of the body is used predominantly over the other, both as a limb and as a weight distribution, inferences can be made about the characteristics of the subject. The left side of the brain belongs to the hemisphere of the same name, therefore the rational one, while the right part is the emotional one. Because of body counter-laterality, the left part of the body is instead connected to the right hemisphere and vice versa. The rational part is concerned with logical thinking, mathematical calculation, word, while the emotional part ‘concerns’ with creativity, emotions, but also with orientation in space and the recognition of faces, as well as the perception of body image.
Thus, the right part of the body (controlled by the left hemisphere) is considered masculine as it is connected to the rational; the left side is the feminine and is about emotion and creativity. If one part of the body is more developed than the other, or is used preferentially over the other, or still gets sick more than the other, deductions can be drawn on the symbolic meaning that is connected to it.
The same can be done for the upper body and the lower part of the body. The upper part includes the head, therefore the thought but also the look and mouth to express oneself. The lower part instead is the one that roots to the ground through the legs, and serves to keep us connected and in balance. Thus, while the upper part of our body, when we come into contact with others, allows us to socialise, communicate and ultimately assert ourselves with each other, the lower part is more about the sense of connection with ourselves, our interiority and emotional stability. Even more interesting is the one concerning the front and back parts of the body. The front part, the one ‘front’ is naturally connected to the social relationship with the other, the part that is shown, the one that reflects the visible and conscious I. The ‘shadow’ part, which in fact we never see, reflects instead the hidden aspects, those of which we are not aware or which we prefer to keep hidden, both from us and from others. That’s why for example the back is the place in the body where the weights and tensions that we can’t bear and look at accumulate. Thus the DMT in Symbolic Method® applies to psychosomatic pathology, psychiatric pathology, as well as psychological distress in the different areas of rehabilitation, socio-educational and prevention.