Making Art in Healthcare: Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange

Excerpt from Stage Presence - Body Presence: Movement and Body Experience With the Elderly by Babette Becker, PhD, CSW, BCD

Liz Lerman, a dancer and choreographer, developed an intergenerational dance company by first training young dancers in her company, The Dance Exchange, to teach and dance with older adults.

Creativity is often arrested in the aged. It is imprisoned by inhibitions, habits, and expectations. When it is released we get a Grandma Moses creating vibrant paintings in the primitive style. If it is never inhibited, we get a Picasso creating until the week of his death. Creativity can be released in many ways.
...The experiences and emotions of older persons can be translated into vibrant, creative works. Usually, however, there must be a program and a setting that encourages and channels free expression into an art form.

Movements can be used to express emotion, re-create an event, tell a story, work out an idea, or simply create joy. Dance is an active expression of individuals' willingness to move, learn, and reveal themselves through their bodies as well as to learn, take directions, work harmoniously, share ideas, and rehearse--to grow as artists, both collectively and individually. As muscles get full play, they are likely to improve in their range of motion, stamina, and agility.

To teach dance to older adults, I rely heavily on the experience of dance itself than on the therapeutic growth of the individual. If each of us listens to our own individual beat, we can create themes and movements. All forms of creativity, emotional and physical expression, physical movement, intellectual agility, and body health together produce therapeutic growth for elderly persons as well as create vitality for rich and long lives.

Read more about Liz Lerman's Dance Exchange here.

Interesting Reading for my Internship

“Accept what is in front of you without wanting the situation to be other than it is.”

This quote serves me as a sort of mantra during the somewhat uncomfortable and unfamiliar territory of working with hospitalized mentally ill patients, who are overwhelmingly medicated on major antidepressants and antipsychotics. But how do I do dance therapy with a heavily medicated patient, or a group of heavily medicated patients? Will the drugs prevent or slow any therapeutic progress in the expressive arts? Are the "numbed" patients able to feel deeply, able to express themselves artistically?

At the library yesterday, I picked up Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry is Medicating a Nation, (2008)by Charles Barber. Here is a quote from it:

"In our particularly American zeal for simple explanations, quick fixes, and overwhelming the enemy with technology, we've too quickly lost sight of the centrality of social and environmental factors. And despite undeniable progress in the pharmacological realm, the enduring truth is that the human factor, and the human approach, remains critical to healing."

For more interesting reading, here's a link to another article about the perceptions of the mentally ill, printed in the Utne Reader.