Primitive Expression and Dance Therapy

When dancing heals

France Schott-Billmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317448822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

This book provides a rigorous and comprehensive account of primitive expression in dance therapy, focusing on the use of rhythm and exploring the therapeutic potential inherent in the diverse traditions of popular dance, from tribal shamanic dance to styles such as rock, rap and hip-hop strongly present in our contemporary society.

Drawing on the author's vast experience in the field of dance therapy, the book examines biological, psychological and anthropological foundations of rhythm based therapies, considering their roots in biological rhythms such as the heartbeat and using such rhythms in therapy. Chapters include:

• The link between animal and man: ethology
• Shamanism
• Gestural symmetry coupling with the other
• Bilateralism as structuring dialogue
• Rhythm dance therapy
• New fields in the application of dance therapy.

Clinical examples are provided throughout the book to comprehensively demonstrate how dance rhythm therapy can contribute to the use of the arts therapies. It offers a fresh perspective for researchers, psychotherapists and clinicians who want to use dance therapy techniques, as well as arts therapists and those who want to learn more about artistic and cultural dance.

Part I
Our link to the world

1
Human world unity

Insofar as dance appeals holistically to the different strata constitutive of human existence, it represents a particularly effective means of integrating these strata and of organising this existence towards coherent activity. Do we not dance with our body and our soul, our emotions and our reason, our unconscious and consciousness? Dancing allows us to synergise all those levels which make us who we are, yet which appear too often in isolation. We are the inheritors of the dualism of western thought, cut off from others and cut in two: the spirit on one side, the body on the other. There are, however, non-dualist cultures whose way of life and philosophy fascinate the West – a fascination often motivated by nostalgia.

We should, of course, remember that the West also harbours non-dualistic and holistic modes of thoughts resistant to the inhuman dissection resulting from an excessive rationalism attributed wrongly to the unfortunate Descartes (Damasio, 1995).¹ The non-dualist position is present in art, oral culture and in the work of certain philosophers, as well as in the experience of the psychoanalytical cure, where the patient discovers that his own words are capable of liberating him from physical disorders. Freud was one of the first ‘explorers of the human soul’ to discover psycho-corporeal unity through the clinical treatment of hysterical patients, whose symptoms presented psychic distress ‘converted’ into corporeal ailments.

It is time to free ourselves from this ‘Cartesian’ heritage which divides man between thought as the foundation of his existence (‘I think therefore I am’), and the body. Freud’s message, announcing unmistakably the unity of the organism, is of a ‘holistic’ character. It is, in this sense, one shared by Nietzsche and could be illustrated by the profession of faith of Zarathustra (Nietzsche, 2003) (‘I am only body and nothing more; and soul is merely a word for something in the body’).²

Yet, he is in equal agreement with the phenomenological current of contemporary philosophy, as well as with the conclusions of the human sciences: the human being is an integrated whole, his mind intimately linked to his body and everything inherited genetically from nature, as well as everything which has marked him socially through culture. Permeated by these different forces, he is a ‘being in the world’ and can in no way isolate himself from it or from his body.

We might note here that the human being of traditional societies does not have a body, in the sense of possessing it. He is his body, deeply bound with the cosmos, to nature and to his community. In the West, however, dualism persists, enclosing the human subject within an individualist position of isolation and mastery, a position whose alienating effects many have denounced (Le Breton, 1990: 13–28).

Recent advances in the exploration of the biological foundations of the human psyche work in parallel with anthropology to show that the identity of the human subject is holistic and non-dualist, the product of a continuity between body and world. This is a continuity which, as I will now seek to demonstrate, dance is in a good position both to create and to restore.

A plural body

Dance plunges its roots into the ‘animal body’ of the human, whose biological foundations constitute an integral part of its therapeutic efficacy. Dance is, above all, a physical activity, harnessing movements which produce effects of a physiological nature: the circulation of blood, the oxygenation of the organs, the repairing of the joints and the heart and other stimulating or relaxing effects. To the extent that we may distinguish it from the other levels which constitute human existence, the physical level is the first to benefit from the dynamising effects of dance.

Dance awakens motor functions which register and (re)produce gestural forms and rhythms originating in biologically inherited organic structures of a genetic or neurological nature. It links us to the memory of our species, the phyologenetic traces of which govern programmed behaviour written into the functioning of our bodies: attack, flight, seduction, protection, domination, submission, nourishment, grooming, etc. Inflected from their initial function to the ends of communication, our genetically programmed modes of behaviour serve as the substratum for an archaic motor language found in the animal but equally in the human, either accompanying speech (via hand gestures, facial expressions and postures) or replacing it (in the pantomime of the child, the gestural component of sign language).

Enabling this primordial language to express itself through the motor functions employed in dance gives us access to fundamental and universal neuropsychic forms, an ‘unconscious stock’ (J.-P. Changeux) of veritable anthropological structures, the malfunctioning of which results in diverse troubles, yet which inversely can be harnessed to remarkable effect in the maintaining and re-establishing of equilibrium. Dance therapy, by ‘activating’ these structures, putting them into shared resonance and expressing them through gesture, is a particularly potent therapeutic tool.

To be added to this first layer of the ‘animal body’ is a second, made up of social signs (greetings, gestures, rituals) which stamp it with the seal of culture. Social discourse superimposes itself over our corporeal collective ‘archetypal’ language. It thereby provides a framework for more individualised forms of expression, which produce, in turn, the third level of personal lived experience. Dance, in other words, constitutes a language in its own right, carrying in similar fashion to words the potently therapeutic capacity for symbolisation. Dance therapy must discover how to make use of this capacity to be effective.

We must not stop at this linking of the human being to its biological-social roots and its self-expression through corporeal language. Dance operates at a fourth level, that of aesthetics, which it shares with the other arts. The search for the beautiful sets in motion the dynamic of sub-limation which, in therapeutic terms, constitutes an extremely effective physic mechanism. The spiritual dimension also operates at this level, giving access to the sacred.

Dance and neuroscience

A consideration of some recent advances in neurosciences will be of great use in helping us to avoid the dualism which would make of dance an activity of the ‘body’ set apart from the ‘mind’.

The brain is not opposed to the body

When we dance with our feet we also dance with our brain, the substrate to which the human psyche is directly linked. This is because the brain does not govern the intellect alone. Neuroscience shows how erroneous it is to see in this organ the fortress of the ‘mental’ dimension. Managing our senses through the sensorial cortex and our muscular responses through the motor cortex, it links them via associative zones and puts us in relation with the world which we ‘mime’ and incorporate thanks to mirror neurons, discovered recently by Riszolatti (Rizzolatti, 2007) and his team at the University of Parma in Italy.³ These neurons project a representation of the action, whether this has taken place or not. This means that to understand what the other is doing, a subject must activate his own motor neurons which under different circumstances will perform the same action as the one in this case observed. These are the neurons which underlie inter-human relationships insofar as they enable us to identity the other and to understand him or her empathetically (Preston and de Waal, 2002: 25, 1–72).

The brain, thereby, mediates outside and inside without any separation between body and mind, rather in an entanglement of functions. Multiple connections and relays unite different zones of the brain developed successively over the course of evolution. These zones are actively involved in dance.

The hypothalamus

The hypothalamus is ‘the brain of the instincts’. Small in size, it is composed of a series of nuclei located in the forebrain. It is these nuclei which induce the states of motivation which lead us to want to drink, eat, make love, sleep, move and so on. The pleasure engendered by such activities resides in the ‘pleasure centres’ located in these hypothalamic nuclei.

The limbic brain

This is the ‘brain of the emotions’. It resides in the ‘old cortex’, the primitive zone of the brain (olfactory bulbs, hippocampus, septum, amygdale) and controls affective modes of behaviour. Damage to these zones results in serious emotional issues such as anxiety, anger and terror.

The neocortex

This is the wall of the cerebral hemisphere. It is made up of a grey substance which is particularly developed among mammals and constitutes the most recent cerebral formation. We customarily associate it with intelligence. Might, therefore, the neocortex represent the pole of the ‘mind’, in opposition to the ‘brain of the body’ (i.e. the hypothalamus), which regulates our instincts, and the limbic brain, which regulates our emotional life? Once again we will have to renounce such a dualism, absent within neuroscience.

In the cortex we find not only concepts but also images, along with the subjective and decidedly corporeal impressions which stir them, or which they engender. The cortex is as much the locus of the senses (insofar as it structures the lived experience) as abstract reason: a musician or dancer uses his ‘head’ no less than a mathematician does, and we know today that emotion is constitutive of intelligence (Damasio, 2003).

Rhythm and trance

Nerve tissue governs our relationship to the world. Each one of our three billion neurons exhibits spontaneous electrical activity, rhythmic surges which serve to code information coming from outside. Rhythm serves as the key to the translation of these messages: a ‘dance of neurons’ producing a language for the brain to interpret. These rhythms give birth to cerebral waves and researchers have shown that our perception of beat, as well as our capacity to move in synchrony with it, is a spontaneous aptitude due to the fashion in which neurons are trained to pulse periodically to its frequency (Nozaradan, 2011). This effect serves to link together distant cortical zones (e.g. the auditory and motor zones), creating an immediate motor response to music. It might also be the case that the resonating together of populations of neurons with the musical rhythms (in particular those of percussion) represents a mechanism for the beginning of the trance-like state (Neher, 1962). As such, we could see this state as the product of a synchronisation of musical, muscular and cerebral rhythms and as an intensification of the connections between the two hemispheres (Aquili, 1979). Such a coordinated activation and bringing into phase of ‘assemblies of neurons’ lead towards the unification of the body through the synchrony of its different parts.

Emotions and ecstasy

The transmission of the nerve signal occurs via the ‘neurotransmitters’, chemical substances which exist in a variety of forms. The enkephalins, secreted in abundance during repetitive and highly oxygenated (‘aerobic’) physical activity, create a state of exhilaration. In rhythm dance therapy, as we shall see below, repeated rhythmic gestures intensify pleasure and the secretion of dopamine which is crucial to the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. The feeling of joy, an integral element in popular dance, therefore plays an important therapeutic role. The enkephalins contribute to creating a ‘modified state of consciousness’ which might, depending on its intensity, correspond to trance, ecstasy, or to use a term less foreign to the West, enthusiasm.

Dance is a vector in the reunification of body and mind. It is an activity which is capable, as we see in particular through ritual dance, of using cerebral properties to link inside and outside, self and world through the intermediary of rhythm. We shall see below that this process of linking constitutes an essential element in rhythm dance therapy.

Brain plasticity

In the brain, nothing is definitive or exclusive. It is a highly plastic organ, forever learning and undergoing modification. This endows it with a property essential to therapy, since it follows that one can always hope to induce changes: replace nervous circuits which have been interrupted, relearn forgotten modes of behaviour, and so on.

Epigenesis

The brain is in need of the exterior world for the very process of its development. Although it possesses along with other organs (e.g. liver, kidneys, lungs) an endogenous mechanism, a genetic programme which fixes its stages of development, it can complete itself only via interaction with the outside. The exterior world plays a crucial role in organising the brain, through a mechanism known as ‘epigenesis’ involving a call–reply dynamic between external stimuli and the brain. The plasticity of the brain has important consequences:

• Man is not only the animal which possesses the longest period of learning, he is also the one who retains it the longest, one might say until the end of his life. He possesses indeed, like the embryo, the privilege of creating fresh synapses and new networks: in short of conserving, when stimulated within a situation of learning, a brain which is ‘always young’. It is crucial to ‘nourish’ the brain by keeping it alive and making it work ‘epigenetically’.
• Learning, essential for the brain if it is to develop epigenetically, consists as much in getting rid of useless branches as in creating new ones. According to J.P. Changeux, ‘learning is eliminating’ (Changeux, 2003: 304). Whenever we learn, something is organised out of chaos, from the ‘noise’ of innumerable unorganised synapses. The model to be integrated via learning creates and, through subsequent repetitions, reinforces certain connections. Thus the action learned is never perfectly repeated, as the neurobiologist Gerard Edelman, Nobel Prize winner in 1972, stresses (Revue Actuel, 1990). The repetitive gesture, which is characteristic of tribal dances and in rhythm dance therapy, is an example of this mechanism of progressive ‘pruning’ in the evolution from initially confused and disordered imitation towards purification and ever-refined stylisation. Primitive Expression is often used with people suffering from Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s.

Coupled movements

Dances originating in Africa have aroused the curiosity of Europeans, ever since they arrived on our shores at the start of the twentieth century due to their energy and the manner in which this is invested in the body. Indeed, these dances closely follow the organisation of the latter, beating like the heart and surging rhythmically like respiration. They do this through symmetrical forms and paired movements, which we discuss at length below (Schott-Billmann, 1989). These structures (e.g. raising the right hand then the left) translate into motor functions, into space and time, the bilateral symmetry of the human body. Moreover, they also express the bipolar fundamental structure of the human being, the binary semantic oppositions outlined by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his study of Amero-indian mythology (Lévi-Strauss, 1990). The Lévi-Strauss paradigm could indeed be applied to other dances constructed around coupled movements to the extent that they are capable, in similar fashion to myth, of awakening (and entering into resonance with) the binary code written biologically into the functioning of the central nervous system. We could, therefore, advance the idea, in taking up Lévi-Strauss once more for our own purposes, that the oppositions present in the movements ‘lend themselves to binary oppositions since these are inherent in the mechanisms forged by nature to permit the exercise of language and thought’. We shall allow ourselves, in any case, the homology between the binary opposition encoded in equal measure into the human body, the psyche and social structures, and the coupled structure of the movement of dance. We could, indeed, extend this homology to the music and dance of oral cultures in general. The acoustic coupling end...