In the first year of my dance movement therapy studies at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, I did a year-long practicum at an international school in Spain. I worked with children in grades one to six. The practicum began with a long period of observation in classrooms, at break times and in shared school settings. Later, some of the children I had observed came to individual dance movement therapy sessions with me. At the same time, at the university, we studied the theory and history of dance movement therapy, embodiment (the significance of bodily experience), anatomy and body awareness, movement observation and analysis, group dynamics, developmental psychology, psychopathology, the theory and practice of psychotherapy, and dance movement therapy methods with children and young people.
Clinical practice does not happen in isolation from the rest of the training. Experiences from the practicum are worked through in supervision together with the other students and a supervisor. Over the year, this proved invaluable. A situation I had experienced as a failure could look completely different to someone on the outside. After one difficult first session, I was convinced that I had not made any kind of connection with the child. In supervision I was encouraged to stop constantly trying to get the child to take part, and instead to do things myself, to be in the space and to leave the child the chance to join in at their own pace.
Personal therapy is also part of the process of becoming a therapist. I consider it one of the most important parts of the training. A therapist does not enter the room as an empty or neutral person. They bring with them their own history, their own wounds, the need to be accepted, the fear of failure, and the things that stir up anger, shame, tenderness or the wish to rescue someone else. If you intend to work with other people's inner worlds, you have to know at least something of your own.
Dance movement therapy is nonetheless difficult to capture in a single definition. It is not a dance class in which exercises are given therapeutic names, and the client does not need to know how to dance. Movement is one way of communicating and exploring experience. A person tells us about themselves not only through words but through rhythm, breath, force, stopping, use of space, gaze, and the way they approach another person or withdraw. With children, play, music, drawing, imagination and various objects often come in as well. Bodily experience can come before understanding. Words can be found later, if they are needed.
Looking is not the same as knowing
I came to dance movement therapy through circus, theatre and dance. I was used to watching the body, movement, rhythm and space. At first I imagined that movement observation would be relatively easy for me. I soon noticed that therapeutic looking demands an entirely different kind of discipline from the artistic or pedagogical gaze.
I built stories about the children too quickly. If a teacher told me that someone was aggressive, I saw aggression in what they did. If a child had been described as shy, a small movement of theirs became a sign of shyness in my mind. If someone seemed confident in the group, I might conclude within a few minutes what their position was in relation to the others. I imagined I was observing the child, when at times I was observing my own theory about them.
My psychotherapy studies gave me words for this experience. Put simply, projection means that a person places something from their own inner world onto someone else. The therapist is not immune to this. In a professional role the problem can be even greater, if one's own interpretation starts to feel like knowledge. During the practicum I began learning to separate observation from interpretation. Instead of thinking that a child is withdrawn, I can note that today they are keeping their arms close to their body, answering in single words and not looking at me much. The former is a story about a person. The latter is an observation of this moment.
In dance movement therapy, movement has no dictionary. Crossed arms do not automatically mean defensiveness, and large, fast movement does not mean aggression. It is more interesting to follow change. What happens when a person begins to feel safer? Does their breathing change? Does the space they use grow? Are they able to lead, follow, resist or stop differently from before? The therapeutic gaze does not try to solve a person but to remain open enough to the possibility that the next moment might change everything I thought I already knew.
The therapist's body comes into the room too
Over the year, in therapy situations, I have felt warmth, pride and a sense of being moved, but also anger, irritation, frustration and powerlessness. Many times I have bitten my lip, because my body's first reaction has not been the one I want to act on. My jaw tightens, my shoulders rise and my breathing becomes shallower. Sometimes a child's restlessness is felt in my own body before I have had time to think anything about the situation. At other times I notice my own breathing calming as the child's movement becomes more settled.
In psychodynamic psychotherapy, the concept of countertransference is used for this. It refers to the feelings and reactions that arise in the therapist in relation to the client. If I feel anger, it does not mean that the other person is angry or that they are deliberately trying to make me angry. The feeling can nevertheless be meaningful. I can ask why I feel the need to take control with this child. Why does their refusal feel personal to me? Why do I want to rescue one child and notice myself distancing from another?
Personal therapy and supervision are essential here. The aim is not to become unfeeling. Rather, professionalism means being able to notice my own reaction before I make it someone else's problem. A therapist's feelings are human. Responsibility begins with what you do with them.
During the same year I have also felt enormous pride and been deeply moved. A child's first uninhibited laugh can stay in the mind for a long time. So can a gaze that holds for a second longer, a hug at the end of a session, or the moment when a child who has said for weeks that they are bad at everything says for the first time that they are good at something. Therapeutic work is often built from very small things.
Leo: from insecurity towards his own strength
Leo was chosen for dance movement therapy above all because of his strong insecurity. He became frustrated easily, often felt that he could not do things and at times spoke about himself very harshly. He might say that he was stupid or bad. He also had an alter ego from a video game who could do things that Leo himself felt he could not. The character appeared especially when a task or a feeling seemed too difficult for him.
With Leo, we found a shared language in football. He was not a child who would happily have sat opposite me and talked about his feelings at length. With the ball, he did not have to. The ball made the relationship understandable. There were turns, movement, a goal, an attacker and a defender. He also got to be good at something, which meant a great deal to a child who so often felt he was failing.
Not all the games were light, however. Leo could kick the ball towards me with such force that one day I really did get hurt. I had noticed before that he aimed the ball at me, especially when he was frustrated. If I did well in the game, his throws could become harder and his own score could shoot up into the millions in an instant.
I did not want to carry on the game in a way that meant I got hurt, but nor did I want to shut out the feeling that had come into the situation. I took two large foam blocks. I gave one to Leo and kept the other myself. He was allowed to push against me with it, and I pushed back. At first he pushed hard. Then he started hitting his own block with his fists. The blows came fast and with force. I held my own block in front of me, received his pushing and at times pushed back.
There was still anger and aggression in it, but nobody was getting hurt any more. Gradually the clumsiness of the foam blocks changed the tone of what we were doing. It was almost impossible to be very frightening with them. We wobbled, bumped into each other and had to find our balance. Leo's expression softened. First came a small smile, then laughter. In the end we were not really fighting any more. We were playing.
This says a lot about what dance movement therapy can offer. There was no need to forbid the aggression, nor to make it into acceptable behaviour. It was given a safer form. Leo was allowed to use strength, to hit, resist and push, but the activity had limits within which nobody was harmed. In bodily work, a difficult feeling does not always have to become a sentence first.
Psychotherapy sometimes uses the concept of containment, which could be described as holding. It refers to the idea that a powerful experience does not have to be removed or resolved immediately. A feeling can be given boundaries that make it possible to experience it safely. With Leo, this was very concrete. Two foam blocks held something that words were not able to hold at that moment.
Later, football also turned into a "lava monster" game. Leo began to come closer, to bump into me playfully and to seek the kind of contact there had been little of at the beginning of the process. The repetition seemed to bring a sense of safety. Within the game he could succeed, lose, chase and be chased. At the end of a session he might say simply that he felt better now.
Over the spring, the way he talked about himself also began to change. The child who had earlier said he was bad at everything later announced that he was the best at football. His parent also noticed that his self-confidence had grown stronger. The sentence was big precisely because of where we had started from. At last he could imagine himself as capable, too.
Sofia: on the threshold between childhood and adolescence
Sofia was chosen for the work for quite different reasons. She was on the threshold between childhood and her teenage years, and the social world had begun to take on an enormous significance in her life. Her friendships involved a lot of disagreements, being left out, power within the group and repeated conflicts. Sometimes these became physical.
One day I went to fetch Sofia for her therapy session and walked into the middle of a fist fight. It was still going on. Sofia was bruised, her hand hurt and her lip was bleeding. I took her out of the situation, we went through what had happened with an adult, and we got something cold for her sore hand. Only after that did we go to the therapy room.
At that point, the plan I had made that morning meant nothing. Sofia did not come into the room with only her thoughts about the fight. Her body had been part of it. Pain, agitation and defensiveness cannot be left outside the door. In dance movement therapy, the aim in a situation like this is not to get the child to dance their feelings out as quickly as possible. The work begins from where the person is at that moment.
Sofia later drew the fight and marked on the paper the places where she had been hit. Drawing gave the experience a form that could be looked at from a slightly different distance. Indeed, dance movement therapy uses a great deal more than dance. Alongside movement, we can draw, build, use objects, rest or talk. The body is still involved, because everything that happens to a person also happens, in some way, in the body.
With Sofia, I was especially touched by her position between childhood and adolescence. Her life already contained a great deal of friendship drama, questions of belonging to the group and the need to find her own place among others. At the same time, there was very strongly a child in her who wanted to build obstacle courses, climb, crawl, dance and play.
In the first sessions she was worried about whether dance movement therapy would mean performing in front of others. Her movement stayed fairly small and controlled. Gradually she began to use the space more freely and to bring in more of her own ideas. In our last session I asked what she had liked most of all. Sofia answered the obstacle courses, because during them she had been able to "play like a child".
It felt sad and beautiful at the same time. She was a child, but being a child could not be taken for granted in every environment. In the therapy room, for a while, she did not have to sort out friendships or her place in the group. She could build a silly obstacle course, crawl on her stomach, invent rules and laugh.
In dance movement therapy, play is not a break from therapy. In play, a child practises being in relationship. They can lead and follow, decide and negotiate, win and lose. They can test boundaries and discover that the connection with another person does not necessarily disappear, even if not everything goes the way they want. All of this can happen without anyone needing to explain to the child which psychological skill they are practising.
Iiris: the price of perfection
In Iiris's case, the reason for dance movement therapy had to do with an intense competitiveness and with how strongly her sense of self-worth seemed to be built around physical ability. She was an extremely skilled gymnast. Her competitiveness, however, had gone much further than an ordinary desire to win. Her parent later described a situation in which Iiris had taken a rival's competition leotard and hidden it so that the other girl would not be able to compete.
This information helped me understand better what I had seen in therapy. Iiris watched herself a lot in the mirror. She knew quickly when a movement worked, and she noticed just as quickly if I could not do the same. At times she challenged me to show what I could do. My circus and dance background made this especially challenging for me, because I could easily have stepped into the competitive set-up. I could have shown her tricks and earned her respect through skill. I had to learn to recognise my own desire to prove that I was skilled enough. If our relationship had been built on my also demonstrating my worth through performance, I would have reinforced the very structure we were trying to explore.
With Iiris, we began to work with emotions through movement. Joy, sadness, worry and anger were given different movements. When we came to anger, she said that it is harder for a girl to show anger than for a boy. We took red and orange scarves. She stamped, struck the air, threw the scarves and used a force in her body that was neither polished nor pretty.
In dance movement therapy, emotion regulation does not mean quickly turning a strong feeling into calm. A person must first be able to recognise and bear their own experience. Movement offers one route to this. Anger can be in the legs and arms before it can be talked about. The body can try out enormous force in a safe environment and discover that the feeling does not have to lead to an act that harms another person.
For me, though, the most important moment in Iiris's process turned out to be my own failure. We were dancing worry and joy, and in the middle of a movement I fell to the floor. It was not a planned intervention. I simply messed up.
Iiris looked at me, and we started laughing. We laughed so much that the exercise came to a halt. For a child in whose world success, performance and competition were so powerfully present, my failure broke the set-up of perfection for a moment. I did not cover up the mistake. I did not try to make it look as if I had meant to fall. Nothing bad happened.
The mistake became a moment of togetherness.
This has stayed with me as an important memory as an artist, too. A perfect performance easily keeps people watching each other from opposite sides. In a shared blunder, for a moment, we were on the same side.
Movement can come before words
From the outside, the processes of Leo, Sofia and Iiris looked very different. Leo needed football, physical resistance and the chance to use his strength. Sofia needed space for the child who was at the same time stepping towards adolescence. Iiris brought into the room a skilled and controlled body, through which a route also had to be found to anger, failure and imperfection.
This has changed my own understanding of dance movement therapy. The core of the method does not lie in particular exercises. The therapist tries to find the language that the other person is already using.
For one person it might be football. For another, an obstacle course. For a third, dance. For someone it might be a piece of fabric to hide under, or a ball that two people move together. For someone, the most important movement might be stopping.
Dance movement therapy uses mirroring, for example. In mirroring, one person moves and the therapist responds to that movement with their own body. The aim is not to copy the outer form perfectly, but to try to capture the rhythm, energy and quality of the movement. If the other person moves slowly, I do not need to hurry them. If their movement becomes smaller, I can let my own movement become smaller too. The body can communicate that I notice the other person and can be in their rhythm.
Objects can also become part of a turn-taking dialogue. A ball, a piece of fabric, a rope or a foam block creates something between two people through which contact can be regulated. We can pull, give way, push and receive. An object sometimes helps to work through an experience from a distance that the person can tolerate at that moment.
Drawing, in turn, can give a trace to movement that vanishes. Movement happens and is gone at once. In a picture, something of the experience remains visible for a while. A picture can give rise to words that the therapist could not have elicited with a direct question. With Iiris, the shape of a heart first became a dance, the dance became a picture, and only after that came a conversation about friendship, having a crush and different forms of love.
The value of art in therapy is connected to this possibility. Not everything has to be understood first. A person can move something before they are able to think it, and draw something before they can say it out loud.
As an artist among people
After this year, I feel it is even more important that an artist does something alongside their art that keeps them close to people. In artistic work, you can spend a long time inside the questions of your own practice, your aesthetics and the work itself. In therapy, the other person constantly breaks the plan. They refuse an exercise I considered successful. They want to play football when I have prepared an improvisation. They get angry, get bored or bring into the room something for which I have no ready answer.
This has also had a strong influence on my own artistic practice. The children's personal stories are not my artistic material. They belong to them. The questions that remain from these encounters, however, travel with me. Alter egos, competition, rage, violence, control, hiding places, shame, failure and play look different now that I have seen that they belong to the lives of real people.
There is a strong connection here between art and therapy. In both, an experience can be given a form before there is a finished story about it. In therapy, however, the form does not belong to the therapist. In the end, its meaning remains with the person whose experience it is.
After a year: presence
During the first year I have read a great deal of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, developmental psychology, psychopathology and movement analysis. I need them. They give me concepts that help me understand, afterwards, what may have happened in a relationship. They help in supervision, in evaluating my own work and in making sure that what I do is not based on intuition alone.
When a person steps in front of me, however, I have to be able to forget all of it for a while.
If I look at a child through a psychology textbook lying open in my mind, I easily see the concept before the person. I can start to see transference before I see a gaze, a defence mechanism before I hear a sentence, or a diagnosis before I notice what the other person is trying to show me.
Theory comes back later. In the moment of encounter, my task is to be present.
Presence does not mean passively being there. It requires attentiveness. I have to hear the words and notice the silence, see the movement but not decide too quickly what it means. I have to feel my own irritation and not pour it onto the other person. To notice my wish to help, and to ask whether the other person needs the help I am offering.
With Leo, I had to be a person he could use his strength against without the relationship breaking. For Sofia, I had to be an adult who could bring her from a fist fight into a room where she no longer had to fight and where she could still be a child. With Iiris, I also had to be a person who could fall to the floor, laugh at my own mistake and still remain the same person in her eyes.
At the beginning of the year, I imagined that a therapist needed, above all, more knowledge. At the end of the year, I notice that I also need the ability to set knowledge down for a moment.
A person does not need to be solved. You have to be able to be with them.
The children's names used in this text, Leo, Sofia and Iiris, are pseudonyms. Identifiable details have been changed or omitted to protect the children's privacy.