The role of arts in healthcare is gaining support. As public awareness increases, educational institutions are responding with programs to train artists for work in hospitals, nursing homes, and rehabilitation units.
The arts in healthcare focus primarily on the patient. However, I believe that healthcare workers themselves can benefit tremendously from parallel attention – particularly in terms of movement education.
I pursued this idea during a semester-long course for nursing students at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My class consisted of Bachelor of Science/Nursing students. These students had already been working in the field – some for as long as 20 years. However, they were working under the credential of an Associate Degree, and most hospitals in the state of Wisconsin were encouraging their nurses to complete their BSN. The course I taught was an elective toward that degree.
My students signed up expecting to enjoy some respite from their very busy work lives. While I sought to provide the unique pleasures of dance and movement, I also wanted students to be able to articulate and reflect upon their experiences, and connect these to nursing.
I soon realized that these experienced nurses were strongly attuned to the health, safety, and well-being of their patients. However, awareness of their own bodily well-being was in the background – at least during their working hours.
I began to address this by adapting a number of Bartenieff Fundamentals sequences for the group, focusing on breath support and ease of movement. This was a good way to start each class, and helped encourage the students to attune to their own bodies and movement lives.
We explored effort through games and improvisations. It was during a flow-related exercise that the group had its first collective “AHA,” realizing that free flow was rarely engaged at work. In fact, it was avoided. Interestingly, students felt that free flow might make them appear inefficient or too casual – less than serious about their jobs!
This led to a discussion of those effort qualities that were prevalent (acceleration and directing), and how to find ways to actively recover with other effort qualities during the day – even if only for short intervals in small spaces – as a strategy to avoid burnout.
We explored the feeling tones of personal and interpersonal space, and how modes of shape change influence touch and what touch communicates. We practiced observing each other in various improvisations, and talked about how we ascribe meaning to movement based on our various backgrounds. This became a significant exercise, raising awareness about how we ourselves are “read.”
The culmination of the semester was the Embodiment Project. This required students to briefly “take on” the movement life of another person. Most of the students chose co-workers or patients. When these sequences were presented in class, we analyzed the body, effort, and space-shape parameters, taking the discussion of how we read movement life to deeper levels. The exercise also sharpened the students’ observation skills and awareness of their own movement preferences.
By semester’s end, it was clear to all of us that nursing is a movement discipline – one that requires a refined and conscious approach to movement, both in its practical and artistic aspects.