Word: patient
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Miss Chace enters a ward where isolated patients sit idly around unaware of others or refusing to recognize them. Her goal is to free the patients from their tightly constructed defenses through dance--to emerge from their separation into a unified dancing group. Starting the record player, usually with a restful waltz, she asks each patient to dance with the group. The most difficult part of the job is recruiting the first few patients...
...patient is never forced to dance, Sometimes inviting gestures are employed. Sometimes a patient is won over by the group leader's sensitive response to his mood. In one session Miss Chace approached a woman who was shouting that people were sticking pins into her backside. The dance therapist, assuming the patient's indignant mood, countered that it must be good for her--or else they wouldn't do it--and that dancing would be good for her too. Would she join them...
Miss Chace encourages patients to break away from the group and to dance alone or in small groups. When she dances alone with a patient, she tries to adopt his mood. Joining a woman who was making broad bending movements and said she was scrubbing. Miss Chase started scrubbing too. The woman caught the dance therapist by the waist and the two moved up and down together, closer and closer to the floor. Just before the large housewife began to crush the therapist, the patient stood up, immensely relieved. Open expression, Miss Chace explained, had begun--the woman was admitting...
...rhythm and feeling of these sessions is so strong that even those patients who choose to sit and watch can still feel a part of the group. One woman who had watched for weeks began dancing. Miss Chace expressed pleasure that the woman had joined them. Very reproachful, the patient said that she had been with them for a long time--she was simply "stronger...
Often mental patients do not talk at all, because they feel that speech has led them to traumatic experiences. For them, most conventional forms of psychotherapy are impossible. In dance therapy, the patient frequently begin to re-establish communication on a non-verbal level...