RACHEL BAKER, a dancer who graduated F&M in 2007, has been writing for New Jersey Family magazine, as well as teaching dance and choreographing at a local studio. Rachel's longstanding interest in dance-movement therapy has resulted in an article on that subject, recently published in NJ Family! Check it out at <http://njfamily.com/en/news/The_Healing_Power_of_Dance.aspx>.
Congratulations, Rachel! Thank you for being an inspiration to other dance writers.
Hi everyone,
ReplyDeleteThis article came about because I was in between publishing jobs and my dance teacher, who's also a nurse, asked for some help organizing her research on dance-movement therapy. I wound up sorting through a large stack of articles that gave me fodder for article ideas at my current job.
On top of the challenge of capturing movement in writing, it's also important to write for the appropriate audience. In this case, I took information from mostly scholarly articles and had to make it accessible for non-dancers and non-medical practitioners. I think the topic of this article helped with that because many of the articles I read during my research discussed using imagery to access different movements and movement qualities. The dance-movement therapy professionals I interviewed for this article were also helpful when it came to using the correct terminology and phraseology for this subject.
I'll be glad to answer questions about this article or my post-F&M experiences with writing and dance.
Best,
Rachel
Hi Rachel,
ReplyDeleteI thought this was so great. After reading your article I began to think that dance is so diverse in movement and even more diverse in description. I believe that not only is it important that the writer describes the movement in a way that the reader will best understand, but also to present another type of movement description to open the reader's mind to more possibilities of writing about dance.
Jaclyn
In our class, we have discussed several broad categories for dance – art dance, social dance, ritual dance, and therapeutic dance. Most of our class work has focused on art dance and social dance. So, it is wonderful that one of our alumni, who took this course some years back, brings us an example of writing about dance in a category we have touched only tangentially.
ReplyDelete