Abstract:

Dance pedagogies within higher education institutions in the UK can have negative impacts on disabled dancers in the studio.  Applying dance theory, somatic practice, disability theory and the neurology of chronic pain, I argue that the integration of experiential anatomy practices and the Feldenkrais Method into dance pedagogies better support the disabled body, physically and mentally, and rebuild trust through mind-body connection to build a nurturing training environment that champions accessibility and inclusivity – rather than platforming elitism and performativity.

The Expectations and External Pressures of Current Dance Pedagogies

It would be no shock to anyone who knows anything about the history of dance training practices that the dance world is notorious for its radical discipline. Dancers take extreme measures to reach their goals and the way in which dancers have been expected to push their bodies to their maximum capacities regardless of the untold consequences that may follow. Both historically and recently, the dance world has been heavily criticised for its attitudes towards and roles in mental health issues, eating disorders, injuries, and disabilities and for the extent to which it allows elitism in the arts to cause both mental and physical harm. Professor of Dance Ann Albright found among participants of her study in the 1990s that even seemingly able-bodied dancers felt intensely disabled by “body image problems” (Albright 1997, 62).A more recent investigation by the British Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC) collected testimonials by former students of top ballet schools in the United Kingdom, who detailed intense body shaming and resultant eating disorders at those schools (Daly 2023).Modern day dancers exist in systemically broken institutions with stringent curriculums and constant financial cuts, both to universities arts programs and to the arts in general. In university programs, dance faculties are being diminished while the remaining faculty take on more responsibilities to patch the holes left by administrative cuts, and dance students bear witness to all of this. It is worth considering the insight of Moshe Feldenkrais, who founded the eponymous movement technique the Feldenkrais Method, that “Education determines one’s language and establishes a pattern of concepts and reactions common to a specific society” (Feldenkrais 1972, 3).

Dance training has often been and often still is disabling. Additionally, this ongoing institutional collapse has also resulted in a crisis in pastoral, mental health, and disability support within universities. In a recent study on disabled students’ experiences in higher education, six key themes came up, including: “(i) impact on education, (ii) isolation from peers, (iii) seeking advice and support, (iv) barriers to assistance and accommodations, (v) impact of accommodations, and (vi) providing guidance and support” (Brewer, Urwin, and Witham 2023). All of these factors have a disabling effect on disabled dancers’ lived experience and thus their self image.

The Disabled Body and Self Image in Higher Education Dance Training

In a thesis on the Feldenkrais Method, Clifford Smyth notes that body image tends often to be “described as involving the subjective, experiential, affective, and socially and culturally influenced, image one has of one’s body.” Especially in dance, body image is most often discussed in relation to body image “issues,” like body dysmorphia and the development of eating disorders. However, from the perspective of a dancer who inhabits a physically disabled body and suffers from chronic pain, my experience of body image is that it can also be embodied through experience, sensation, and pain in the body.

Feldenkrais himself focused instead on self-image, which he defined as consisting “of four components that are involved in every action: movement, sensation, feeling and thought” (Feldenkrais 1972, 10). For Feldenkrais, the experience of bodily pain is an emotional experience of the self. Navigating chronic pain in relation to a physical disability in the studio can include not having trust in the body due to a strong feeling or experience of previous ”failures,” a distrust in others to support your body due to medical traumas and experiences of discrimination and insensitivity to the disabled condition, having to adapt movement that was created by and for able-bodied people, and working through the frustrations that come with all of this. This amounts to a complex self image for the disabled dancer in the studio, and dance pedagogies could better support dancers navigating these complexities.

The Problem with Traditional Warm Ups

Drawing attention to your body before or at the beginning of a dance class is not only an expectation of good practice but also a part of dance etiquette set up by dance teachers. To not warm up your body is not only a disservice to your body before it undertakes the significant physical challenges of a dance class, but it has also been known to show a lack of care towards the class and teacher. However, somatic practitioners have drawn attention to traditional dance warm ups as lacking. “Dance warm ups often tap into only a few body systems or developmental patterns – usually the ones that support a specific dance style or mood” (Cohen 1993, 14).

There also tends to be a divide in perspectives of pre-class studio preparation between dancers who have been trained to focus on bodily self improvement and therefore spend their time stretching on the floor or at the barre and dancers who have received training in, for instance, Nancy Stark Smith’s philosophy of “arriving in the space,” whether arriving energetically or physically (Smith 2013). The introduction to embodied practices such as contact improvisation into institutional dance training at the university level has created a shift in practice and expectation. Overall, this implementation has had a positive impact on dance education overall, but I want to draw attention to the ways in which some of these embodied practices exercises can marginalize dancers in the space living with a physical disability and/or chronic pain.

In contemporary dance and somatic practice and theory, much focus is given to embodying experiences and becoming in tune with the self in a plethora of different, integrated ways including mind, body, spirit, soul, emotion, physical sensation, politics, etc. However, my experience as a disabled dancer is that I am often being asked to search for pain in my body as if that quest is a difficult one. This has been asked of me during meditative practices, such as body scanning / body mapping in which you gradually pull attention to different parts of the body individually during a meditative state to assess and acknowledge certain sensations. In BodyStories: A Guide to Experiential Anatomy, Olsen (1991, 17) explains that this sensation “might be a tingling, a vibration, an itch, a pain.”  While not all somatic / embodied practice facilitators draw on pain, as a student with six years of full time dance training at secondary educational institutions (college, undergraduate, and graduate), I have been instructed to seek out my pain many times.

Yet, in the same way that we now widely accept that actors should not have to abuse their lived experiences of trauma or engage in method acting to evoke emotion for a scene (Samithamby 2022) a disabled dancer should not have to seek out the feeling of pain in their body to be able to understand, relate to, or embody movement effectively. This is not to be confused with the very valuable skill of being able to assess one’s needs, capacities, and boundaries in the studio.

Commonly in dance practice, we preface every class by prepping the body so that it is ready fulfil the needs of the dancer and the class. Physically warming up the body and also arriving early in order to arrive in the space with conscious intentionality is not only encouraged but expected-- embedded in dance culture as a form of etiquette.

Body mapping /scanning is a very simple way for the student to arrive in the space energetically and for a facilitator to begin to conduct the room. However, body mapping with the intent of acknowledging and labelling pain in the body is not a healthy or helpful way of starting the class for someone living with chronic pain or fatigue.  People living with physical disabilities and chronic pain are known to be hyper aware of sensations in their bodies.

The Disabled Dancer & MBC

Chronic pain is both a physical experience and an ongoing internal disruption of energy – it has its ways of gripping onto and impacting every facet of the human body and psyche.  As Moss (2003, 5) notes, “the majority of primary care patients’ complaints lie in the twilight zone between body and mind, marked by overlapping psychological stress, physical discomfort, relationship conflicts, life-stage dissatisfaction, and unfulfilled aspirations.”  Thus, I argue that we can draw a direct comparison between the intentional meditative practices used in higher education dance pedagogy and that of the experience of inhabiting a body with chronic pain.

The disabled body is already habitually wired to have a strong and deep mind-body connection. Dancers with disabilities are always navigating that “twilight zone” (Moss 2003). Furthermore, drawing attention to symptoms of pain for someone living with chronic pain does not have the benefit of alerting that dancer to an injury or bodily damage they need to address.  “Chronic pain, meaning pain which lasts longer than 3-6 months, doesn’t signal damage or injury. Like a faulty alarm system, chronic pain is your nervous system sending out too many or amplified pain messages” (D’arcy-Sharpe 2020). The fact that many, if not most, dancers live with pain for decades and still label their ailment as an injury rather than a disability illustrates how the dance industry, and the arts in general, fears the disabled body and its implications for their livelihood and life’s work.

Not only is drawing a disabled dancer’s focus to their chronic pain not particularly helpful to them, it can be harmful. By purposely encouraging dancers in the studio to explore the sensation of pain in their body, there is the risk that the disabled dancer may develop hypervigilance  “an enhanced state of sensory sensitivity accompanied by an exaggerated scan or search for threatening information” (Herbert et al. 2013). Hypervigilance can in turn have the effect of increased pain intensity (Goom 2012). In this situation, the mental can transform into the physical.

The Negative Impact of the Medical Model on Disabled Dancers

A lot of people with physical disabilities will have had experiences of people in their lives, including medical professionals, that translate the disabled person’s felt experience to medical terminology. The modern “Western” world has predominantly existed with the Medical Model view of the disabled body. This can have impact on the dancer in the studio, as dancers draw on their experiences in life to feed into the technical know-how of movement” (Houston 2024, 5). Medical doctors tend to translate the experience of their patients to make sense in a medical paradigm, for instance using disease and anatomical terminology instead of experiential.  Thus encountering anatomical terminology in dance training can bring the medical model into the studio, and can provoke anxiety for disabled dancers.

Moshe Feldenkrais on Facilitating the Disabled Dancer

The disabled dancer’s experience of inhabiting an environment that does not support or nurture their learning needs could be considered in light of what Moshe Feldenkrais termed crossed motivations.  “Crossed motivations, according to Feldenkrais, occur when the intention for action is not clear – perhaps because the original intention or learning was formed under too much pressure. Crossed motivation can lead to inability to act, hesitation or lack of completion of an action” (Smyth 2012, 31). Feldenkrais seeks, through his dance pedagogies, to navigate the individualism of each disabled body and create a space where the disabled dancer has the capacity to enable self learning in a way that is still self-preserving.  Along with luminaries such as Audre Lorde (2017), this radical approach to care has informed and shaped contemporary calls for accessibility in all sorts of environments. However, the world of dance education too often neglects to reflect and adapt to ensure the accessibility of dance training.

Experiential Anatomy as Foundational Dance Pedagogy

An alternative to somatic body scans and medicalized anatomical terminology that supports the disabled dancer is experiential anatomy. Experiential anatomy was introduced to me by Lalitaraja Chandler (University of Roehampton) as a way to establish markers in my body that could be felt both physically on the outside of the body by the hands but also explored internally. Experiential anatomy and Feldenkrais methodology go hand in hand, so to speak. In Feldenkrais, there is the intention to find the easiest pathway, navigating the body gradually to acquire embodied knowledge via experiential anatomy. Experiential anatomy allows us to question how we accommodate ourselves, others and the space through feeling and sensing. This assists “the process of anoetic knowing” (Houston 2024, 5).

The ability to feel the mechanics of your body with your hands via bony landmarks is experiential and embodied without drawing on feeling pain to be able to discover this in ourselves. For example, by placing your fingers behind your ears and nodding your head or touching the back of your neck and shaking your head to understand the impetus or point of initiation for a head movement, we can adopt and apply further information about the functionality of our bodies. Another set of practices in experiential anatomy entails finding the hinges, creases and hollow parts of the body to explore the natural collapses in the body and how they can support efficient movement. What are the natural pathways in the body? Is there chronology within the body? This practice doesn’t require a conversation about scientific anatomy, but aids in bodily self-knowledge and movement knowledge.

An evocative example of experiential anatomical imagery is the idea that there are only three vertical bones in the body. Everyone, both able bodied, injured or disabled is made up of a skeleton that mimics Tetris. If the body is viewed as somewhat of a mechanical mess, this can take away some of our own insecurities around where our disabilities materialise in our bodies-- the idea of being freakish, broken or damaged-- and remove feelings of shame, envy of peers, and competitiveness within the studio. The disabled body could thrive with the possession of “somatic authority” (Green 1999).

Something as simple as granting yourself permission to rest or making sure others hold you accountable to do so through consistent communication, boundary setting, and enthusiastic consent can lead to you developing compassionate sensibilities towards yourself as an entity and as a body in the space.  Through both personal experience and conversations with many other disabled performers, I have noticed that there is already a distrust and disconnect with the body because it “lets us down” in so many ways – both catastrophically and minutely on a day-to-day basis –  which builds frustration and resentment towards the body that we inhabit.

Experiential anatomy exercises help dancers develop an understanding of their personal anatomy and for disabled dancers, to also rebuild trust in their bodies. This trust in the self is fundamental to participating in dance practices that also involve trust in other bodies, like contact improvisation.

Adapting Pedagogies to Support the Disabled Dancer

Feldenkrais methodologies can enhance dance pedagogies in ways that support all dancers. As Smyth (2012, 28) explains, in Feldenkrais, “Students are encouraged to move in ways that do not cause strain or pain, or increase any pain they may already have – and to rest whenever they want to. Thus self care is learned as part of the process.” Smyth’s 2012 studies collected testimonies from patients with a variety of ailments including chronic pain that implemented the Feldenkrais method into their daily routines and both saw and felt differences in their bodies and the way they operated. These differences were not only related to physicality such as improvement of mobility but also to the way they felt in their own selves.

Gilmore (2012, 95) urges us to consider people with chronic pain “as active producers of meaning rather than bundles of recalcitrant symptoms or medical mysteries.” Dance educators must strive to foster an environment where students can speak openly and freely about the impact that dance training has on both their body and their psyche. Students should be discouraged from “pushing through the pain.” Long term pain, no matter the cause, might be reframed as disability in order to normalize disability. After all, able-bodiedness is just a temporary condition for all human bodies. Disability may not appear the ways we imagine it to, and we may not be able to “see” it at all. Feldenkrais methodologies like experiential anatomy allow disabled dancers to experience their bodies and ready them for dance without exploiting their symptoms and their self image. For dancers like me, encountering these methods in the studio feel like radically supportive and inclusive care and make dance more accessible. Let’s radicalize care in the dance studio.