Artistic Research

Can dance be used as a medium to canalize and interpret emotions? How can I use dance to face emotional quandaries and personal life questions?

I have been dancing since I was three years old. 18 entire years of my life I have learned to move my body intuitively or through choreography to music. A wide range of different dance styles, including children’s ballet, (musical-)jazz- and street dance, lyrical, contemporary and ballroom, coming full circle with adult ballet again, has been following me through all stages of life. Childhood, youth and adulthood. Through endless happiness, family issues and tragic heart ache. Dance has always been there. And so I have spend my entire life taking everything that I was going through with me into the studio and onto the stage.

I got the idea of researching how dance can help to determine and work through feelings of any nature because of a period of deep emotional stress that I went through last year. During that time I could have only describe my physical state as wanting to crawl out of my own skin and gripping my chest to close the hole I felt in it. Letting go would have meant to feel pain so deeply that it would have probably been unbearable. This made me think about how different I want to handle my body depending on how I feel, emotionally.

I have always known one thing. And that is that dancing intensifies feelings. That is because you feel your body more consciously through moving muscles in an intentional way which makes you also feel the physical response to the emotion that is dominant in your body at that time.

From childhood on, you want to dance of excitement. I think that is because so much energy is felt trough excitement which you want to set free. So, we are especially easily able to let go when we feel good. On the contrary, I can see myself wanting to avoid feeling any more than necessary when I am feeling down.

„Dance like nobody’s watching“ is a popular motto from the 2010s. This state of letting go completely can only occur when one feels safe. Feeling self-conscious or even scared can conclude in not wanting to move at all. Since I was a young teenager I have dealt with anxiety which manifests itself in a total freeze response. This means that I feel paralyzed when I am scared. I become unable to talk like normal and want to isolate myself.

How can I use dance, which has been there for me through all lighthearted and all challenging times of my life, to free me in moments of immense stress? The realization that dance defines and intensifies feelings is very eye-opening. Can I use dance as a form of meditation to determine what I feel emotionally? Because it is especially important to reveal emotions that I suppress in order to be able to work through them. I classify this process as artistic research. Dance becomes the medium to research and investigate what I am feeling and maybe even recognize why I want to prevent just that.

In moments of despair it takes courage to do exactly what you do not want to do: feel. Over the course of a few weeks, I intentionally tried to use my dancing skills when I felt sad, lonely, angry or frustrated. One muscle at a time, I am setting myself free out of the fear or stress trance. During this, I can see that I can actively clear my head through dancing. I use my body intentionally to work through what my head wants to suppress and can determine for myself what is going on inside me, emotionally. I can conclude that dance does actually work as a form of meditation.

Dance and Movement can be used as a key to interpret emotions and in the long run maybe even to work through trauma. The embodiment of a mental state can bring mental clarity and help to achieve inner peace. „Dancing the data“ is actually an already existent concept (Carter, Celina, „Dance and Choreography as a Method of Inquiry“, September 2020, in Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, under https://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/3448/4638).

Dance as a research method is challenging to capture since it is mostly a mental process. To show what dance can achieve nonetheless, my sister helped me to create a photo series of me dancing over a paper roll with black paint on my feet that leaves marks wherever I step. This is how I could capture my mental process while dancing literally step by step.