Dancing with My Other-Self: A Self-Portrait History of a Healing Process Through Dance

Abstract

Where does the seed of recovery from trauma, from illness, from injury find ground, sink roots, and start to grow? Can one find empowerment in a body, subjected to illness, trauma and disability? In this autobiographical article, the authors takes us on a journey into illness, where despair threatens her very will to live. In fact, she becomes to herself something foreign, grotesque, and completely other. And yet, hope sprouts. This work has two voices: the primary voice describes the power of dance in her healing from paralysis (hemiparesis and complete disfigurement of the face) due to viral encephalitis caused by herpes zoster (chickenpox). Sentenced not to walk again, she desperately and willfully turned to dancing to help in her recovery. It took her two years to return to formal dance classes and seven years to perform professionally again.  In this article, she shares in an intimate conversation how dance can be more than an aesthetic art, and can support the process of transformational rehabilitation. The secondary voice from the co-author urges dance/movement therapists to listen carefully to direct experience, and utilize an embodied inquiry into illness and healing. Autobiographical experience offers an invitation for dance/movement therapists to further their understanding of the lived experience of rehabilitation and the psychology of illness and thereby deepen their capacity to clinically support the painful process of integration when healing does not look like a return to a level of prior functioning.