Rhythm is a Dancer: Psychology and Physiology of Dance
As we prepare to celebrate the New Year, we might wonder about the different uses of dance in modern and historical healthcare. In November, our Friends Secretary participated in an event at the Wellcome Collection, which explored the relation of dance to mental health and illness. The evening was part of the Rhythm is a Dancer event series, in which dance performances and discussions take place side by side, offering new perspectives on the physiology and psychology of dance. Two events are yet to take place, in January 2013 - keep an eye on the website for tickets, as they book out rapidly!
November's event explored the way in which dance has been characterised as both illness and cure in the realm of mental health. From a historical perspective, both ideas often emerged side by side: asylum balls, thought to improve the quality of life and the self-control of the individual, existed alongside widespread concern over the wild movements and fits exhibited in diagnoses like hysteria. Art historian Nancy Ireson, for example, told the audience all about the life of Jane Avril, the French Can Can dancer made famous in the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec. Jane was admitted to the famous Salpêtrière Hospital as a teenager, under the care of the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot. Suffering from a movement disorder, she claimed that the hospital dances contributed to her cure: an idea picked up in contemporary healthcare by Sara Houston, a dance lecturer (and former dancer), researching the use of dance in Parkinson's Disease.
Dance was certainly an important part of Victorian asylum life, as described in Charles Dickens’ article on the Christmas Ball at St Luke’s Hospital: A Curious Dance Round a Curious Tree. Yet conditions such as hysteria might also incorporate an element of performance within the symptoms exhibited by patients. Charcot claimed the disease had four distinct stages, which his star patients could produce on cue in weekly lectures. Thus, within nineteenth-century mental healthcare, dance could be represented as both curative (restoring the self-control thought to have been lost during madness) and pathological (representative of a neurological condition resulting in a failure to control impulses). Thus, throughout the event, it was made apparent that dance can function both as a form of freedom and a means of control: sometimes, perhaps, both at the same time.
