Dancing with Disease: A Dancer’s Reflections on Moving with People with Parkinson’s and Memory Loss

I am a professional dancer, choreographer, and Alexander Technique instructor. I joined the Performing Arts faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in 1994, where I teach contemporary concert art dance and somatic practices. Dancing is fundamentally a study of coordination, balance, and movement control. Because these essential goals are shared in movement therapies, I have become interested in contributing knowledge gained by dancing and collaboration with scientists working on therapeutic interventions. I am particularly interested in evidence that, for people attempting to mitigate symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD), dancing in a variety of forms is emerging in scientific literature as an effective approach (1, 2). Furthermore, dancing is valuable to people who do it, not only for cognitive and motor issues but for social and personal fulfillment, while living with PD (3). I am also interested in correlative evidence suggesting that dancing, as a lifestyle activity, may confer a protective effect against risk of dementia (4). In this article, I would like to share several personal insights regarding dancing and why I believe it is so effective. In 2008, I met Madeleine Hackney and Gammon Earhart who were engaged in a series of studies demonstrating that Argentine Tango improved balance and functional mobility in people with PD (5–7). I was invited to create and administer an untested intervention for PD using “contact improvisation” (8). We showed similar improvements as the Tango pilot study. However, participants reported preferring improvising (not having to learn step patterns), and the increased human touch that the practice fostered became valuable to them. This report in the participant survey is among the most meaningful to me; I firmly believe that live human touch is an essential ingredient in physical, mental, and emotional health. During this past year, my students and I conducted a dozen non-scientific workshops for people with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), applying creative dance practices I learned from dance artist Liz Lerman (9). Memories are not just “in our heads,” they are whole-person, embodied experiences – what I call “corps memories.” I am intrigued by evidence that integrating a motoric component such as pantomimic gesture or sign language during learning improves memory retention (10, 11). In workshops, people shared memories, and we created dance from the spontaneous gestural movements that typically accompany speech when they become immersed in reverie. This organic combination of narrative and kinesthetic sensation seems to enhance the details of memory. Artistically, there is something poignant, “dancing” memories that will be lost.