Dance & Movement Therapy

Dance & movement therapy (DMT) is defined by the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA) as the psychotherapeutic use of movement to promote emotional, social, cognitive, and physical integration of the individual, for the purpose of improving health and well-being.

 

In the 1940s, this form of psychotherapy emerged as a field. Early innovators, many of whom were accomplished dancers, began to realise the benefit of using dance and movement as a form of psychotherapy. DMT is a holistic, embodied, movement-based approach to healing, based on the empirically supported assertion that mind, body, and spirit are inseparable and interconnected. Changes in the body reflect changes in the mind and vice versa.