Health |

In late April we celebrate National Dance Week. This year’s festivities come with scientific evidence that dancing is good for you! A research team based at Colorado State University found that contra dancing may help to fend off aging in the brain.

A four-year clinical trial followed a group of 174 healthy adults aged 60 – 79. The group was divided into four parts. One group did aerobic walking, another not only walked but also took a nutritional supplement, the third group participated in stretching and balance classes, and the fourth group attended contra dance classes involving a sequence of figures as dancers progress up and down a line. Each group met three times a week for six months.

The study focused on the fornix, which connects the hippocampus with other areas of the brain and is believed to play an important role in memory. Each participant’s fornix was measured at the start of study and six months later. The integrity of the fornix increased in the dance group in contrast to declines noted in half of the other participants.

This finding led researchers to conclude that “there is more benefit in activities like dance, that simultaneously provide cognitive and social stimulation in addition to physical activity,” according to an article in The Denver Post.

This study of the benefits of contra dancing is just the tip of the iceberg. Find out more in the next blog.

As the benefits of physical motion are gaining recognition and undergoing further scrutiny, it is interesting to see how Laban characterized movement health. He wrote, “A healthy human being can have complete control of his kinesphere and dynamosphere…. The essential thing is that we should neither have preference for nor avoid certain movements because of physical or psychical restrictions.”

Clearly, Laban views movement as healthy for both the body and mind. He prescribes a rich range of motion, noting “we should be able to do every imaginable movement and then select those which seem to be the most suitable and desirable for our own nature.”

When I did my Laban Movement Analysis training in the mid-1970s, the faculty used to give individual “movement prescriptions” in the middle of the year. These were meant to be fun and usually aimed to encourage exploration of less preferred movement elements. However, the underlying rationale was not made transparent to students, who were sometimes left guessing as to why they received a certain prescription.

Warren Lamb took a more direct approach in the hundreds of individual movement tutorials he taught in the late 1950s and early 1960s. First he assessed the individual’s movement patterns. Then he worked with their effort and shape preferences, gradually building less preferred qualities into a unique movement sequence that the person could continue to practice and refine.

Want to find out more about your own movement patterns? Join the “Introduction to Movement Pattern Analysis” course, March 17- 19, 2017.

April Dances Bring Advances 1

Movement Health – Laban-style