Santa Fe New Mexican - Healthy Living
Dancing for joy
DANCING IS ONE OF MOST HOLISTICALLY HEALTHY THINGS YOU CAN DO FOR YOURSELF. Like other forms of exercise, dance helps reduce stress and inflammation (which are linked to a host of health problems, including cancer and diabetes) and improves strength, mobility, heart health and immunity. Like yoga, dance helps connect the mind and body, extending its benefits to the brain and psyche of the dancer and to the extended organisms of community.
Grounding and roots
“I had to translate fear into medicine,” says Rulan Tangen, artistic founding director of Dancing Earth.
Dancing Earth taps deeply into the healing powers of indigenous dance. The company’s philosophy entwines individual and environmental health, and its dances have a ritualistic intention to replenish both.
“The role of healing is implicit,” says Tangen. Dancing Earth in fact emerged from Tangen’s battle with stage-four cancer. “Before that time, my life was dance. After, dance was life,” she says. “The ancestral
understanding of dance is a way to give back to the forces of nature and the earth. Dance makes and maintains balance and harmony.”
Dance circles bring participants’ heartbeats into synchronization, creating a communal empathy.
Dancing on the earth, being careful of cacti and rocks, involves moving through the world with awareness.
“We recognize the body as an expressive emanation in relationship to other bodies, land, air and water, and reflective of the environment and imagination as well,” says Tangen.
Dancing Earth develops performance pieces through its interaction with Native communities around the country. Tribal elders guide the creation of work with wisdom and with advice about how to remedy modern ills. Youths weigh in about the future they want to see and how to bring it into being.
“There is a lot of dystopic fear and hopelessness in the world. Apathy perpetuates this,” explains Tangen. “In Dancing Earth’s futurity salons and sustainability institutes, people are invited to participate as dancers and citizens to cultivate hope through the power of imagination.”
In the company’s most recent piece, Between
Underground and Skyworld, the dancers transmit an embodied evolution from apocalypse to viable future. “The characters on stage are secret superheroes,” says Tangen, “and the dancers step into and become these roles.”
Notably, the company’s stunning costumes and sets are made from recycled and found materials. In the coming months, Dancing Earth will host workshops dedicated to cultivating sustainable wellness. (See sidebar for details.)
Have to dance before you can walk
Dancing does wonders for the developing brains and bodies of babies and children. According to the National Dance Education Organization, “[Dance] is innate in children before they possess command over language and is evoked when thoughts or emotions are too powerful for words to contain.”
Ingrid Hurlen, co-artistic director of MoveWest Center for Movement Exploration, teaches Nurturing Baby classes at Indigo Baby, a shop in the DeVargas Center, and Parent/Child Creative Dance & Music classes at the Railyard Performance Center. Based on the BrainDance program, her classes contribute to children’s physical development, understanding and socialization. “The month-to-month and year-to-year progress is incredible to observe,” she says.
Designed for children age 1 to 5, Hurlen’s classes also create important opportunities for parents and children to play and bond. “Parents fully participate. We see how play is so important. We also form a community, which is a boon we don’t always have in our culture today. It is miraculous to see how dancing together enhances learning,” says Hurlen.
BrainDance, developed by Anne Green Gilbert, reflects and reinforces the stages of neural development, helping babies grow and nurture neurological pathways.
“Movement is key to learning!” Gilbert writes. “A
baby’s first communication is through movement. Our brains fully develop through dance activities such as crawling, rolling, turning, walking, and so much more. The baby ‘programs’ her motor/perceptual equipment, nerves, and brain cells by using her whole body and all of her senses.”
Dancing for empowerment
Myra Krien, founder and director of Pomegranate Studios, helps women of all ages find inner strength and beauty through belly and tribal dance. Belly dancing calls for exceptionally subtle articulation of the midsection. It stimulates often-neglected nerves and muscle groups, including the psoas muscle. This muscle, which connects the lumbar vertebrae to the femur, is often constricted by time spent sitting at work. The muscle is also connected to primal fight-or-flight instincts and carries tension that can affect the rest of the body.
“You store all the emotions, stress, and trauma in your body. It’s so powerful to release that through dance,” says Krien.
Perhaps more importantly, belly dancing — especially the way it’s taught at Pomegranate Studios — creates a sense of celebration around the female body and female community. “The feeling that control over our bodies isn’t our own is so often reinforced,” says Krien. “Dancing together is a way to rediscover our power.”
At Pomegranate, community and confidence are nurtured by a cross-generational group of teachers and students who take classes and perform together. “The rituals of getting ready, putting on the clothes and costumes, doing the warm-ups and performing together create a bond and strength. There’s always a combination of excitement and terror before a performance. Going through that as a family is special.”
The dancers span an age spectrum from teens to older adults, and there is a vital exchange of ideas, perspective and support. “Younger people have a lot of ‘champagne energy.’ It’s bubbly, light, exciting. The older women who dance with us have a more grounded energy, not to mention profound life experience. It’s really healthy for these to be able to mix.”
Additionally, Krien directs a yearly program for young women called SEEDs (Self-esteem, Empowerment and Education through Dance). SEEDs convenes an annual cohort of 13- to 18-year-old girls to explore individual and community goals and challenges through dance practice, historical investigation and life-skills training. “At that age, it’s vital to be witnessed and accepted by people outside your immediate home,” says Krien. “We help girls discover validation in themselves and each other through dancing.”
Dancing to address collective trauma
Amy Compton, co-artistic director of MoveWest and a teacher at Santa Fe High School, uses dance to help her students tap into, express and heal individual and collective trauma.
“This work began when I had to show the Sandy Hook ‘See Something, Say Something’ video to a freshman class of high school students,” says Compton. The initial response was distressing; she was met with dismissiveness and evasion. “I’ve also observed apathy and collapsed physicality in beginning dance students. I try to convince them to take up space, to not be passive and to initiate movements, as opposed to letting movements just happen to them.”
Compton finds a connection between withdrawn physical and psychological patterns in students. “I propose we are all living in a world of collective trauma. Dissociation is a common survival technique that leads to a decreased ability to feel, empathize and make connections with self and other. We experience this due to school shootings, the environmental crisis, separation of families at the border, etc. It feels like we can’t do much about it, so we dissociate in order to keep living through it day after day.
“The good news in trauma research is somatic movement, improvisation, theater, self-awareness practices and numinous experiences can help heal and integrate our dissociative responses non-pharmaceutically, activating the brain’s neuroplasticity for healing. Dance helps process what the head doesn’t always understand, but the body knows and leads.”
Dancing, incarceration, and creation
An organization called Keshet runs the M3 (Movement + Mentorship = Metamorphosis) program, bringing daily dance classes to New Mexico’s state juvenile detention facility. Incarcerated youths engage with academic subjects and conflict resolution through dance and choreography. Students continue their work with Keshet mentors through the post-release transition and reintegration.
“Our curriculum is about connecting artists to artists, not inmates,” says Shira Greenberg, founder and artistic director of Keshet. “We see and treat the participants as dancers and choreographers, and that helps them to see themselves with the same potential.”
Participants are connected to a statewide network of artists post-release. They are supported in becoming professional artists. They are also encouraged and trained to take up community leadership roles. “We use the arts to try to cultivate a healthier community that integrates more voices for the better. The peer learning system empowers these young artists to become community leaders,” says Greenberg.
Several participants have recently assumed leadership roles in
Keshet’s expanding Movement for Mercy program, which carries M3 to a nationwide scale.
Dancing to demedicalize
The Dance for PD program was developed in 2001 as a collaboration between the Brooklyn Parkinson Group and the Mark Morris Dance Group. The driving principle is that professional dancers and people with Parkinson’s disease deal with the same challenges — things like balance, coordination, rhythm and movement sequencing. “Dancers do it exquisitely,” says BPG founder and executive director Olie Westheimer, “and persons with Parkinson’s do it in order to function every day.”
Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that wreaks havoc on someone’s ability to move. Primary symptoms are shaking, rigidity of the limbs and/or torso, slowed movements and difficulty balancing. Research indicates that exercise slows the advancement of the disease. Dancing does the same thing, with the added benefits of social inclusion and an artistic, rather than therapeutic, focus on one’s self and body.
“People think of PD as a movement disorder, but it’s really a quality-of-life disorder,” says Dance for PD program director David Leventhal. “Depression, isolation, changing relations, diminished sense of ability — these really start to wear away a person’s identity. Your sense of who you are can change from a holistic, healthy person to full-time patient. This program takes people to the feeling of being dancers and away from feeling ‘medicalized’ as just patients.”
DFPD participants agree. “Before I came to the class, I felt alienated from my body. The dance class makes me feel like a dancer because I am dancing,” says one. According to a caregiver participant, “This dance class has nothing to do with PD. The participants are not patients. No one is telling them what they should do or can’t do because they have Parkinson’s. The focus is not illness; it is living. It is self-expression, human connection, joie de vivre, beauty, love. It’s magic. It’s precious.” Tamara Johnson started her writing career at “Dance Magazine.” She studied at the School of American Ballet in New York and has performed and taught in the U.S. and abroad.