Abstract
All of those interviewed have themselves either directly or indirectly worked with and/or been trained by dance pioneers, including such luminaries as Martha Graham, Rudolf von Laban, Merce Cunningham, and Anna Pavlova. As both a dancer and dance movement psychotherapist, I straddle the worlds of dance and health with a special interest in the interstitial, “boundary” places where differing worldviews of movement, dance, and embodiment offer valuable insights to practitioners and researchers in both fields. This review attempts to identify some of these insights.
When I was talking to a journalist from the BBC this morning, he said something about dancing when you're so old. I said, well you know, it's an interesting thing: there's something you never lose—your body may not respond to what is inside your head, but that quality of knowing movement never leaves you.
The book is well crafted throughout, with a very poignant introduction that alerts the reader to the impact of the 12 mature dancers' “personal voices and words…with a subjective precision that can only come from the artists themselves.” The authors cover a wide span of practitioners in terms of gender, race, and age, and they place special emphasis on the themes of longevity and continuation. Dancers interviewed here range in age from their mid-40s to mid-80s at the time of interview. Also of particular interest is the theme of connectivity that runs throughout. For example, we see the same questions asked of all the dancers: How do you keep fit in both body and mind and how are you sustaining your craft into older age?
These questions are of particular interest to the younger dancer, in part because a recurring theme challenges the common notion in more traditional dance careers, that the career will most likely end in one's mid-30s, or at least that the performing part cannot be further sustained, as no longer will the body be able to cope with the rigorous demands of rehearsal, performance, and long touring schedules. Throughout the book, this myth is constantly challenged by the interviewees' reported life experience, offering insight, hope, and inspiration to the generations of dancers to come. Provided one maintains a level of mental and physical fitness sufficient to one's needs as performer, dancer, teacher and improviser, there need be no barrier to extending and developing practice into late old age and none should be artificially imposed.
Why should this book be of interest to practitioners and students of complementary medicine? Consider the parallels. These are dance pioneers who have done their work unequivocally outside of the context of mainstream approaches to dance, such as those propounded by ballet and contemporary dance, yet their influence on changing the world of dance has nevertheless been profound. These are pioneers who collectively have brought in softer, “ideokinetic” approaches to movement and dance, involving disciplined concentration and the use of imagery, bridging mind and body, thus allowing deeper creativity, self-expression, and well-being. These advances have been informed by the extraordinary work and teachings of movement, dance, and bodyworkers including F.M. Alexander, M. Feldenkrais, A. Bernard, B. Clark, M. Todd, and R. von Laban.
Further inspiration is drawn from areas as diverse as gymnastics, clowning, aikido, mime, philosophy (Tagore), and meditation practices. Collectively, their influence has seen ballet companies such as the Richard Alston Dance Company bringing much softer, release-based techniques (with imagery, pedestrian movement, and dancing from the “inside-out” as the key), including Contact Improvisation ((founded by Steve Paxton [an interviewee] in the early 1970s, and based on exploring the intricacies of sharing weight between partners and in groups) into their repertoire and extending the range, quality, and emotional impact of their work as a result.
Transposing the dance world into the complementary medicine field, is it not also true that many complementary medicine practitioners are themselves working outside of mainstream biomedical science and medicine? In no small way they too are making similar inroads into effecting awareness and change concerning other more qualitative, perhaps cost-effective, and certainly less invasive ways of treating and rehabilitating human beings suffering physical and mental ill-health. They, too, are practitioners working in interdisciplinary ways, studying and learning from different disciplines and related approaches. For example, bodyworkers practicing the Rosen Method, Rolfing, or Sensory Integration also remain open to other methodologies and approaches, actively studying them to clarify differences; this enriches their understanding, and perhaps most important of all enables them to manifest in the process a pioneering spirit, an inquiring mind, and sense of adventure that informs their inquiry and feeds into their practice.
I make no apology for the impact The Wise Body has had on me. I have been surprised and encouraged by the different ways in which each dancer reflects on their own creative endeavors, particularly in relation to movement improvisation, and how these have influenced their own life choices, sometimes with radical and life-changing shifts in direction. For example, in the interview with Julyen Hamilton, he describes as “hell” (p. 64) the decision to leave the famous London Contemporary Dance Company (at that time under the leadership of Robert Cohan) after only 2 weeks in favor of working with Rosemary Butcher. In complementary medicine speak, this would be like shifting from biomedical science to Traditional Chinese Medicine; it is philosophically, clinically, psychologically, and economically very different. With such a decision taken at a crossroads in life, the dancer recognized that he could not continue on the previous path, with the story demonstrating how that decision played out later in life. Julyen engaged in uniquely valuable research about dance and human creativity, which gives confidence to us all that extraordinarily difficult decisions can be taken, when what is truly at stake is heard, understood, and acted upon.
The voices presented here in different areas of the field, including South Asian Dance, Tap, Contact Improvisation, and Release and Alignment Techniques are fascinating in themselves; however, also shared are the different ways each dancer finds inspiration from a range of different sources including poetry, philosophy, and environmental concerns. These “interstitial” studies in addition to sophisticated movement- and dance-based research on their own “bodies” also play out in performance, in teaching, and career development, continuing to grow and develop, each feeding the other, nourishing mind, body, and spirit.
My own research in relation to dance and dementia has involved “building bridges of understanding” 1 among the worlds of dance movement psychotherapy, social anthropology, ethnography, phenomenology, philosophy ethics, and dementia studies, in the process of deepening understanding of my own practice. Here, there are interviewees who I have connections with as teacher, mentor, and colleague. Reading their stories, I have been better able to place my own dance training and later experience in context of their lives and work. I have also been inspired to read Isadora Duncan's Autobiography, in response to the Jane Dudley interview and to consider new choreographic ideas for taking my performance work forward in relation to the Lisa Nelson interview.
This book sheds light on complementary yet different practitioner worldviews in differing disciplines. Those who live and work, both on the edges of mainstream dance and in its center, have much to learn from it, as do those who practice complementary medicine and biomedical science. We are reminded to continue to stay open to different disciplines and approaches, studying how they might inform and grow our own thinking and practice, helping dancers stay in touch with leading visionaries and pioneers, enabling all of us in both worlds to keep abreast of new developments. In particular, for dancers involved in therapeutically based work, the courage this book gives to remain attentive and open to the creative and improvisatory, both as dance practitioner and therapist, is certainly groundbreaking.
By paying particular attention to physical fitness—a strong theme throughout the book—and the different ways the dancers interviewed maintain mental acuity to continue performing professionally, they are indeed influencing the future training and career development of all dancers. Thus, all dancers in the future can now have role models for continuing to practice their craft into old age and perhaps late old age. This book is an absolute joy to read, inspiring respect and admiration for the pioneering work and life stories of the dancers contained in its pages. The authors are to be congratulated for such a scholarly and deeply meaningful work for dancers and complementary health practitioners alike.
Footnotes
1
Coaten R. Building bridges of understanding: The use of embodied practices with older people with dementia and their care staff as mediated by Dance Movement Psychotherapy. University of Roehampton: PhD Thesis, 2009.