Dance the blues away
- Source: Global Times
- [21:38 March 28 2011]
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Tang Hoe dances. Photos: Guo Yingguang
By Jiang Wanjuan
Dance can bring people together, relax them and build confidence and, for some, it can also heal.
Dance therapy, the psychological use of body movements to manage emotion, has arrived in China, thanks in part to Dr Zhou Yu, who picked up the habit when studying in Europe.
Dr Zhou established Beijing-based NPO Inspirees International, which has just begun its first three-year program to train a batch of 15 students from China, Singapore and Mexico, as dance therapists.
Communication therapy
Joan Wittig, a member of the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) and program director of a movement-therapy training institute in the US, was invited to Beijing last week to give the first week of training.
In dance therapy, movements serve as communication instead of language; swinging, jumping, bending and mostly random and spontaneous movements are encouraged to express feelings.
"Dance therapy is the use of dance and movement You need to be controllable in your own body and have a wide range of movement," Wittig told the Global Times.
In the past 20 years, Wittig has faced patients' eating disorders, anxiety and depression at psychiatric hospitals and her own practice in New York.
"Most people I work with have dissatisfaction in their lives and they came to therapy because they want to know more about themselves and live a more satisfying life," she said. "Psychiatric patients [are] so isolated in the world through dance therapy, they will figure out how to create relationships with other people."
