Music and Health: Dancing Together
โPeople always say, โWell, if I could only do one art form, what would it be?โ And I always say dance.โ โSusan Magsamen
In our podcast miniseries Music and Health, weโre exploring how music impacts our minds, bodies, and communities. In this installment, weโre learning about the power of dance. Host J. D. Talasek is joined by David Leventhal and Constantina Theofanopoulou. Both began their careers as dancers and use dance to inform their current work. Leventhal is a program director and one of the founding teachers of Dance for PD, a program that offers people with Parkinsonโs disease research-backed dance classes. Theofanopoulou is a research assistant professor at Rockefeller University. Her research focuses on understanding the neuroscience of complex sensory motor behaviors. They discuss how dance is helping patients regain movement abilities, and what neuroscience research says about dance as a form of healing.
This series is produced in collaboration with Susan Magsamen and Leonardo journal.
Resources
- Listen to the first episode of the mini-series, Music and Health: The Creative Arts and Healing, featuring Renรฉe Fleming and Susan Magsamen.
- Visit the Dance for PD website to learn more about the program, and find classes in your area or virtually.
- Learn more about Constantina Theofanopoulouโs research by visiting her website.
Transcript
J.D. Talasek: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University.
Iโm J.D. Talasek, director of Cultural Programs at the National Academy of Sciences. In our new miniseries, Music and Health, weโre exploring how music impacts our minds, bodies, and communities. In the first installment, we talked to Renee Fleming and Susan Magsamen about research into the arts and health and the growth of this new field. In this episode, weโre focusing on the one art form Susan said we should all do, dance.
To learn more about the power of dance to heal, Iโm delighted to be joined by David Leventhal and Constantina Theofanopoulou. They both began their careers as dancers and use dance to inform their current work. David is a program director and one of the founding teachers of the Dance for PD program, which offers people with Parkinsonโs disease research-backed dance classes. And Constantina is a research assistant professor at Rockefeller University. Her research focuses on understanding the neuroscience of complex sensory motor behaviors.
Constantina, David, itโs such a pleasure to have you both here. Iโm looking forward to this conversation. Letโs just jump in. You both have very nonlinear, very nontraditional careers. I wonder if we could start with what I like to call an origin story. What were those moments in your life that led you to where you are now? And David, I wonder if we could start with you. You have such a prestigious dance career and then you started down a different direction that included dance but not traditional. Can you tell us about that?
David Leventhal: Sure. So I started dancing when I was eight. Iโm going to save you all of the details from eight to my early twenties when I joined Mark Morrisโs group. When I joined the company, it was still an itinerant band of dancers who rehearsed around the city and then performed around the world. And I loved it, it was an eye-opening experience for me.
In that first class, I became aware of the immense power of dance to transform the lives of people living with physical challenges.
About four years into my time with the company, we opened a new dance center in Brooklyn, and this was a purpose built studio building really with the goal of providing a home for the company, but also to serve as a community center. When we talked about community, we talked about really anyone here in the city who might benefit from the experiences of dance and music. One of the people who came through our doors in the first month of being open was a woman named Olie Westheimer, and Olie had been running a Parkinsonโs support group for about a year. She worked with this group of people with Parkinsonโs who had been referred by her husband, who was a neurologist at Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.
Olie, in her experience of leading the support group, started hearing stories of people living with Parkinsonโs and started realizing how much their lives became taken over by or enveloped by Parkinsonโs. And she really wanted to think creatively about something that she could do for the group that would not be just focused on talking about Parkinsonโs. And the idea that came to her mind was dance, because she had a dance background. The same period she read about the opening of the Mark Morris Dance Center, came here, met with our team and pitched this idea.
I got involved while I was still very much in the beginning of my performing career with this company. In that first class, I became aware of the immense power of dance to transform the lives of people living with physical challenges and in this case, Parkinsonโs. I didnโt know that it would become a global program, a global network, but I knew in that moment, it was in October of 2001, in that studio, I knew there was something quite remarkable happening and that I wanted to be part of it. So as the program expanded, the teaching work I did in the Parkinsonโs community became this parallel track to my performing career, and in many ways overshadowed it, in terms of the personal significance and, as I saw it, the impact that this work could make on community members living with Parkinsonโs and those living with other challenges. It became a model for how dance can help transform the lives of all sorts of people in our communities.
Talasek: David, thatโs an amazing story and it reminds us of what we do as scientists, as artists. It really comes down to our humanity. Constantina, your story is just as great. I mean, from dance to neuroscience. Tell us about this.
Constantina Theofanopoulou: Absolutely. Thank you for this question. My trajectory has been really fueled by two core passions that I was pursuing really separately. The one was dancing and the other was my passion for anything that has to do with our ability to speak, our ability to communicate our thoughts through words, sentences, and so on and so forth. Dancing was something I pursued after school, although it really came to be a really central part of my life. I ended up dancing around the world, dancing in the National Opera, and the type of dance that I really got enamored with was flamenco.
This very passion for the neurobiology of speech was actually what brought me back to dance in a full circle fashion.
So in parallel, I started developing my academic career where I started working on the neuroscience of speech and what is it in the human brain that makes us able to communicate our thoughts through spoken words, through vocal signals. And very interestingly, this very passion for the neurobiology of speech was actually what brought me back to dance in a full circle fashion.
So what happened? My Eureka moment was something that happened in the beginning of my PhD while I was working on the neurobiology of language in humans. So this moment came where I wanted to test a hypothesis which was going really deeply into the brain mechanisms of vocal communication and these type of hypotheses we are able to only test in animal models. The kind of animal models that we use to better understand vocal communication in humans is actually songbirds and parrots.
As I was delving into specifically the parrot literature as a graduate student, I found information that parrots, not only are they the best vocal communicators along with humans, theyโre also the only species in the animal kingdom other than humans with really robust scientific evidence of being able to dance or, more specifically, to entrain their body movements to a beat in music. So realizing this link, namely that humans and parrots share both these really advanced vocal communication abilities and also this rhythm based movement, sparked my thinking about this potential link between speech advanced brain pathways that basically has inspired my research agenda.
Talasek: Thatโs so wonderful. While weโre talking about thisโthis is a very simple question, but Iโm sure itโs a complex answerโwhat do we know or what is it that we think that we know that enables movement and dance to, not treat Parkinsonโs disease, but to help empower patients? What is it that we think that we know and what is it that we still need to understand?
Leventhal: Well, Iโm speaking from the perspective of a teaching artist in terms of what I observe, with information mixed in from conversations Iโve had with neuroscientists and neurologists. What seems to happen in the dance environment is that because weโre addressing very specific choreographic tasks that are supported by imagery and music and patterns, people in our classes are able to approach movement with a very thoughtful, conscious mindset that detours around some of the automatic parts of the brain that are typically responsible for movement.
People in our classes are able to approach movement with a very thoughtful, conscious mindset that detours around some of the automatic parts of the brain that are typically responsible for movement.
When you ask someone with Parkinsonโs to walk down the street, sometimes that task can be quite difficult because the automaticity that non-Parkinsonโs people have in a task like walking becomes less reliable. So the automatic gait pattern, the automatic rhythm are less likely to kick in and support that particular movement. But when you ask that person with Parkinsonโs to walk in rhythm, in a dance class and to do a specific style in that step, they have to integrate the rhythm, the imagery, the narrative, the sense of connection that they have with the other dancers. All of these other parts of the brain start to work together to enable that person to walk with rhythm and with grace and all the ways that theyโre not supposed to be able to walk living with Parkinsonโs. Itโs really, in my mind, about harnessing all aspects of a personโs thoughtfulness, creativity, and of course different parts of their brain, to overcome some of the deficits or challenges that they have with the Parkinsonโs affected part of the brain.
Thatโs my laypersonโs working model of it. So I see people having difficulty coming into the studio, but in that actual class experience with music supporting their movement, with strong patterns and imagery supporting their movement, theyโre able to move in ways that are graceful, rhythmic, fluid, controlled, and ways that often surprise the Parkinsonโs dancers themselves. Because why canโt I do this outside of the studio? Here I can do it. Well, itโs because theyโre using all of the tools that dancers use to control and express movement through their bodies.
Theofanopoulou: So what I really want to highlight first is that, if it werenโt for David Leventhalโs work and other peopleโs work showing the really impactful effect of dance on several behavioral aspects, then people like me wanting to delve more deeply into the neurobiology of it, we wouldnโt really have the foundation that we need to ground our work onto. So this was really the important foundational work that made me convinced about dancing and made me really want to go and look into the brain.
What I also need to highlight from the perspective of a neuroscientist is that I really got surprised at the scarcity of evidence from a neural perspective. Basically, currently there is only three studies that have looked at the differences, the brain differences, in terms of brain activity after a dance training. I really wanted to bring up a work that Iโm doing in collaboration with Madeleine Hackney at Emory University where we believe that weโre starting to tap into potential mechanisms through which dance may benefit some people with Parkinsonโs disease.
The walking group really advanced in this expected progression of Parkinsonโs, whereas the dancing group did something different.
Our current understanding is as follows. Basically, as the disease advances, what happens is that patients increasingly rely on the cerebellum, an important part of the brain, to compensate for motor functions that are not working properly due to other weakened connections. So they really start to overcompensate by over-relying on the function of the cerebellum. What this means is that in networks where the cerebellum plays a minor role in healthy, elderly adults, PD patientsโParkinsonโs disease patientsโexhibit really stronger connections with the cerebellum and relevant networks.
So what weโre finding in our preliminary results of a study where we had people with Parkinsonโs be involved in a dance intervention for 12 weeks, and the control group that was doing for the same time walking for 12 weeks, is that we found that the ones that were involved in the walking group actually strengthened their cerebellar connectivity with other parts of the brain. Whereas people who were involved into dancing, they really strengthened non-cerebellar connections. What this would mean is that basically the walking group, although I do believe that walking is definitely better than just sitting on the sofa, the walking group really advanced in this expected progression of Parkinsonโs, whereas the dancing group did something different.
What is also very interesting in the context of the speech and dance relationship that I talked about, is that specifically we found strengthened connections in the primary motor cortex and other areas that control movement of the hands and arms and also more unexpectedly movement of the laryngeal muscles that could contribute to possibly enhanced motor control that would be relevant to speech.
Thatโs what we are starting to understand. But we really need more studies, more control groups, different timeframes of 12 weeks, three months, 11 months of trials in order to really understand what changes in the brain that could be impactful and that would be really the brain mechanism that would explain what David is really seeing in person in his classes.
Leventhal: And if I could add onto that, I think we tend to focus a lot on the motor aspects of what weโre doing, which of course is critical when youโre talking about a condition thatโs often classified as a movement disorder. But people living with Parkinsonโs experience Parkinsonโs as a full spectrum quality of life challenge. And when you think about the experience of dancing, it is also a full spectrum quality of life intervention.
People living with Parkinsonโs experience Parkinsonโs as a full spectrum quality of life challenge. And when you think about the experience of dancing, it is also a full spectrum quality of life intervention.
Not only are you working on motor skills like walking and turning and big amplitude movements, which are all very important, encountering the natural movement progression that happens in Parkinsonโs, but youโre addressing things like emotional connection to music or to movement. Youโre also highlighting the sense of social connection that happens when we move together as a group in a meaningful activity like dance. We are very far from understanding the value of something like social connection and social bonding in support of brain health, but weโre starting to see some initial indications that activities done in a solitary vacuum are far less effective than activities done in a social environment. We are wired as social beings, and Parkinsonโs actually fights against that tendency because it tends to isolate people. It makes them less likely to go out and be part of social groups. It makes them less likely to want to be seen out in the world.
I would harken to hypothesize there are also impacts on motor function that relate to that sense of being part of a group, of entraining to other people moving together to the same movement. And I think thatโs a very important element that weโre just really at the beginning of the exploration stage to understand how that impacts other aspects of brain health and particularly related to movement.
Theofanopoulou: Absolutely, I could not agree more. What the brain really shows to us is that motion and cognition are really intertwined, and I really wanted to talk about and bring an example. So letโs talk about behaviors that we think of as purely motor. Letโs say for example, that we want to study movement initiation. One example would be to imagine someone sitting in a chair and deciding to stand up. Something that is possibly very easy for several of us, but something pretty difficult for several people who suffer from Parkinsonโs disease. Successfully initiating this movement sends a reward signal to your motor pathway, reinforcing this action of standing up and the next time you want to stand up motivates you, the same pathway motivates you back to repeat it and to want to initiate this movement. So there is a creation of this reward and motivation loop, or as we call it feedback-feedforward loop, that really is the one in the same with the motor aspect that enables someone to really stand up.
What the brain really shows to us is that motion and cognition are really intertwined.
What Iโm trying to highlight through this example is that although in most of the literature you will see mentions of the reward or motivation pathways as being part of more complex cognitive functions, ultimately in order for someone to stand up and to just engage in movement initiation, we really need these more โcognitive functionsโ to fit in these motor loops in order to enable us to just produce this movement successfully.
Leventhal: Itโs so interesting that you said that because that is a section of class that we spend a lot of time thinking about from an artistic perspective, because of course thereโs a lot of information about the very mechanical ways that one can get up from a chair. There are techniques that are used by physical therapists and occupational therapists. But we tend in class to focus on using that transition as a narrative, as a story. Weโll bring in imagery, for example, a tree growing, your roots are going down, your branches are going up. We will have music to support that experience.
In essence, I guess you could say that what weโre trying to do is to hyper activate that sense of reward that one gets by going through what can be quite a difficult task, seated to standing, but weโre making it as pleasurable and delicious as possible. That is one way I think that the arts and dance in particular can supply these layers that reinforce some of the neurological patterns that may already be happening. And so they use the power of theater and imagination to move through that transition and then to feel that sense of accomplishment and reward that happens at the end of that movement sequence.
Theofanopoulou: This is really great and so powerful that youโre working on associating a specific behavior with another one or a memory of an imagined or existing experience to facilitate movement. Itโs really impressive how the brain works by association. What youโre doing in this class very successfully is that youโre trying to tap into all these mechanisms that we more scientifically or less scientifically know that they exist and give them sense for people to be actively helped. Thatโs really amazing.
Talasek: I want to jump in and just really underscore a couple of things that youโve been talking about. This ideal of going through a therapy or something thatโs therapeutic, itโs not easy. If youโre really suffering throughโwhether itโs Parkinsonโs disease or something elseโitโs hard to stay motivated and itโs so intensely powerful, this idea of the visualization to move you past that weight of the therapy and to lift you out of that. Seems incredibly powerful.
I wonder if we could talk a little bit more about the social aspect of this. And the reason Iโm bringing this up is Iโm reminded of an advisory that the US Surgeon General came out with I think it was a couple of years ago, that was on isolation and loneliness as being of epidemic proportions within our society and thinking about how not just in treating Parkinsonโs disease, but how important this type of interaction is socially to our mental health and our emotional health.
Theofanopoulou: Absolutely. I think youโve made all the important points. I would add just my 2 cents being that one of the important reasons why I so much believe in these dance interventions that weโre working with is this social aspect and this aspect of community. This is something that we donโt see in other kinds of therapies, and dancing is something thatโs happening in a social context.
Sometimes I also get this question when it comes to me proposing that dance could be a good way to really alleviate speech symptoms in people with Parkinsonโs disease. What happens with people with Parkinsonโs is that they keep complaining that all the speech therapy training or classes that they have to go through in order to alleviate some of their speech symptoms is that for them, it is really basically very, very boring. They have to be with one person, with one speech therapist, and go through the same drills of exercises where they hear themselves say things in a way that does not really correspond to how they used to perceive themselves speaking. So by bringing them in a social context with dancing and not having them really be exposed to their own speech output, which is not most of the times motivating, is really trying to tap into this social component and have it inform other important social communication behavior such as speech.
I think the pandemic was a good lesson, thatโs the only positive word that I can find right now, for all of us to understand how important social connection is.
The second part that I wanted to really stress is that most of my previous work was done in one really important neurohormone that is involved in social behaviors, that goes by the name oxytocin. There are all these other studies that show how it is involved in hugging, kissing, et cetera, et cetera. What we are finding in our studies is that basically oxytocin acts on these same pathways that are important and involved in speech, and weโre now testing if it is involved in dancing. Actually, there is one study showing that after an intranasal oxytocin administration, people showed a more synchronized partnered dancing. What this means is that possibly the link from oxytocin to dance is already being established.
What I mean by that is that, well, something that we considered as being purely social, purely dependent upon hugging, kissing someone that we love, seems to be also involved in these, again, โmotor behaviorsโ of speech or dancing. I think the pandemic was a good lesson, thatโs the only positive word that I can find right now, for all of us to understand how important social connection is and how important it is for all these hormones to be regulated in a proper fashion for us to feel well and to function well in several aspects of our lives.
Talasek: Wonderful. And I think this is a good place to switch and think about what it is that we need to move forward. What type of research is needed to move forward? What are the challenges?
I guess thatโs actually a good way of thinking about this question because listening to David talk about this movement and how this drew him in more so than he originally thought. David, thinking aboutโฆ it almost sounds easy. It almost sound like this happened organically, but yet I imagine that thereโs barriers to this type of interaction and this type of, and I donโt want to use the word therapy, but this sort of treatment or maybe it is therapy. What are the barriers that youโve come across, David, in implementing these types of things and what might need to be done differently to move this forward?
Most of us dance as young people and then somewhere along the line, itโs ironed out of us.
Leventhal: Well, there are so many barriers that weโve encountered over the last 23 years, and they come from many different angles. I think first and foremost, itโs just the perception that regular people canโt dance or that regular people donโt dance. โItโs not for me.โ โI canโt do it.โ โI have two left feet.โ All of that rationalization, which is really a shame because weโre all born to dance, weโre all wired to dance. Most of us dance as young people and then somewhere along the line, itโs ironed out of us. It is something that goes away because itโs seen as something thatโs not serious. Itโs frivolous. Itโs something maybe even embarrassing.
A lot of our work has been about reminding people of not just the right that they have to move their own bodies in a joyful way to music, but that dance is a really important cultural and artistic form that has for millennia brought humans together, created, to go back to our previous conversation, created a social bond and social glue. Itโs helped us tell stories. Itโs helped us pass down history and traditions and ritual. Itโs also a beautiful art form. So a lot of people will go and see dance, but when they engage in that witnessing of dance, it reinscribes the idea that they canโt do it because theyโre seeing professional dancers whoโve trained for decades.
A lot of our work is about the fact that you can start dancing right now. You donโt need any permission. You donโt need any special tools. You can do it with any body, your own body, with whatever your body can do in the moment. Moving to music with intent is dancing and everybody has the possibility to do that. So a lot of our work has been about messaging, that dance is for anybody, dance is for everybody. Everyone is welcome. And then our job as teaching artists is to make dance as accessible and inclusive as possible.
The other big area of barriers, this really come from the medical world where I think people were very hesitant to endorse or refer people to arts based programs because they just simply didnโt see the evidence in the early days. When we first started our program in 2001, exercise itself, any kind of exercise was very often counter indicated for Parkinsonโs. Neurologists would say, โOh, you should probably not exercise because you might fall, and that will lead you to acute needs, acute care.โ A lot of the research in the past 20 years has really flipped that 180 degrees because now, of course, exercise is seen as something thatโs as important as medication in Parkinsonโs.
We know that people move better, walk better, have more fluidity, have better balance, but what we donโt understand is exactly why that happens, how that happens, and what parts of the brain are involved.
I certainly see dance as part of that. And the 50 plus research studies on the impact of dance on Parkinsonโs support both its efficacy and its safety. So now we get inquiries calls from neurologists, medical centers, insurance companies asking for this program because theyโve seen the research and they know that it works and theyโre not scared of recommending dance. But for many years, a big barrier was, if I recommend dance as a doctor, will my patients think Iโm a lightweight? Will they think Iโm recommending something thatโs frivolous and, heaven forbid, fun? How can I recommend something thatโs fun? I will say that probably say 70 to 80% of our participants in New York come to us through a physician referral. That is a huge change from 10 or 15 years ago.
I will say in terms of desires, we see that the program works. We see that neurologists believe the program works, but we need to know why. We need to understand whatโs going on under the hood or in the brain that actually creates the effects that we see in the dance intervention. We know that people move better, walk better, have more fluidity, have better balance, but what we donโt understand is exactly why that happens, how that happens, and what parts of the brain are involved in that complex process of being able to execute motor skills and movements that might otherwise be very, very difficult outside of a dance context.
Theofanopoulou: I really want to touch on this second challenge that David mentioned from my perspective. I really also found a huge allergy to the word โdanceโ in the beginning, meaning in the medical field. More specifically in several grant applications, the feedback that weโve been getting is basically do not use the word โdance.โ You can use several synonyms such as โrhythmic-partnered movementโ or โrhythmic aerobic exercise,โ but do not use โdance.โ I think this was something that really surprised me in the beginning as to why is there such a reaction or aversion for a word that relates this kind of training directly to something artistic. This is one thing that I faced.
More specifically in several grant applications, the feedback that weโve been getting is basically do not use the word โdance.โ You can use several synonyms such as โrhythmic-partnered movementโ or โrhythmic aerobic exercise,โ but do not use โdance.โ
So what I really tried to do from a neuroscience perspective was to try and understand why there was such a reaction. So working on both the drug-based medicine field in the context of oxytocin, as I mentioned, but also in the context of dancing, I am trying to really find what people in the medical field would expect from something that they would need to endorse as therapy. And one important aspect in the drug-based interventions is what we call reproducibility.
What we know for drugs is that once you have a recipe that you have found works, youโre trying to run this trial, this study, in several different subjects and see how it works depending on several variables. What is really invariableโwhat stays really the sameโyouโre always using the same drug, whether this is a pill, whether this is something that youโre intranasally administering in the case of oxytocin.
Whatโs happening with dance is that reproducibility there is less easy. And so thatโs why I believe that initiatives like Dance for Parkinsonโs disease, that David Leventhal has done such important work, and it is really so necessary for all these lessons that David and others have taken in the past years to be put in specific protocols that are reproducible. And I know very well that David and others are giving classes and training workshops around the world so that these kind of modules, these kind of workshops are actually reproducible.
And I think we also need to work on really writing them down so that neurologists and people wanting to have an impact in policy, so that these people can go and show a specific paper where it is written what people with Parkinsonโs are doing every day in each class. Itโs not that just they go and they dance and they do whatever the teacher feels like doing, the instructor feels like doing. They really do very specific things that are reproducible. I think that this has been a major challenge, but there are ways to face it.
And from the perspective of neuroscience, I think we are missing several items that we are now working on. This is still a recent, young field, the dance neuroscience aspect of the dance science field. We need to first of all know when is it good to start this kind of therapy? When is it good to say to people, okay, you should start dancing. For this, of course, we need a faster diagnosis. What is also missing is knowing how long it is enough and sufficient for dance training to have X, Y, Zed impact on the brain. And thatโs why weโre running the studies that we are running. I believe there are several barriers, but there are solutions and ways to face them, which is the happy part of this.
And lastly, I just wanted to say that all these challenges that we brought up really point to the fact that unless the studies that we do are truly interdisciplinary, we will not be able to address them or really resolve them in the near future. So Iโm really in favor of this kind of project where we have several different scientists from different disciplines.
Leventhal: So important. I will say as well that itโs researchers like Constantina who are really moving the needle of this field, because you, in your own background and your own training, are an interdisciplinary thought leader. You are bringing together your dance knowledge, your dance background, and your scientific knowledge and training, and youโre able to serve as a crucial bridge between two fields that donโt always know how to speak to each other.
We started this conversation about speech and being able to have that social connection, but artists and scientists donโt always have the same language, even though their thought processes are often very similar. We both are hypothesizing what could be, trying to fill the space of questions that come up for us in our process, whether itโs a scientific process or an artistic process. So I think thereโs a lot of overlap, but the language is different, and in some cases the goals are different.
Talasek: David and Constantina, you both are amazing cross-disciplinary thought leaders, and I just want to thank you for sharing your insight. I know I for one am coming away from this conversation more informed with a better understanding of what this relationship is between dance and healing, specifically as it pertains to Parkinsonโs disease. Is there a final message that you would like to leave, maybe specifically to people with Parkinsonโs disease or their caregivers and their family and their loved ones?
Leventhal: Well, I always go back to the voices of the Parkinsonโs dancers themselves as the ultimate inspiration for what we do and the ultimate reason for why we do what we do. Two statements come to mind at the moment. One is that in the dance environment, in dance class, nobodyโs a patient. Everybody there is a dancer. Everybody there is treated as a dancer. And the class is really structured around their experience as dancers. They may be new dancers, theyโre coming to it for the first time, but theyโre dancers.
In the dance environment, in dance class, nobodyโs a patient. Everybody there is a dancer.
I think that idea of identifying as a dancer is a really important component of what we do because it says to people, weโre not here talking about a disease or an illness or a problem. Weโre here to explore the capacity and possibility that is available to you as a human being, as a moving body, as a member of the community, and by labeling and naming someone as a dancer, weโre looking at potential, weโre looking at opportunity, weโre looking at hope, weโre looking at that sense of lifelong learning. And as a dancer, you have to train every day. So thereโs a certain responsibility that dancers, like athletes, itโs a constant ongoing practice. People with Parkinsonโs, more than anyone else have to think like a dancer and/or an athlete because they need that level of self-care and attention to managing their well-being.
The second quote that comes to mind is what somebody said to me a number of years agoโone of our participants named Mannyโand he said, โWhat I love about this class is itโs not about whatโs the matter with me? Itโs about what matters to me.โ And I think as we deal, contend with Parkinsonโs other neurological conditions and aging in general, we have a much larger proportion of our population who are older adults, we have to keep asking that question, what is meaningful to you? Not whatโs the matter with you, but whatโs meaningful to you? And then how do we as artists, as scientists, as doctors, as therapists, how do we respond to whatโs meaningful for our population, for our community, with something that is nurturing and sustaining and supportive? So itโs not making assumptions about whatโs meaningful, itโs building healthcare and healthy practice around what is meaningful for each individual. That truly is the way towards health and healthy communities.
I keep those two quotes in my mind because they inspire me, they drive me forward, and they help remind me what is really important about this kind of experience and this kind of activity.
Talasek: To learn more about the benefits of dance on Parkinsonโs patients and more, visit our show notes.
Please subscribe to the Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcasts, and write to us at podcast@issues.org.
The Music and Health mini-series is produced in collaboration with Susan Magsamen and with Leonardo journal. Thanks to our podcast producer, Kimberly Quach and our audio engineer Shannon Lynch. Iโm J.D. Talasek, director of Cultural Programs at the National Academy of Sciences. Thanks for listening.