In sickness and in health, dance makes it better

When marimba rhythm starts to play, Parkinson’s patients at a Buenos Aires hospital sway to recover their own lost rhythms. In a ward in the Argentinian capital’s Ramos Mejia Hospital, where time is measured in halting, hesitating movements, the strains of the tango, slowly but certainly, start to loosen muscles stiffened by the neurological disease. Bodies that had ceased to trust themselves start to recapture, a little at a time, an older fluency.

In thus using dance, the Argentinian hospital has joined a growing trend in healthcare that recognises the therapeutic power of rhythmic movement when combined with the standard treatment protocol for diseases such as Alzheimer’s, fibromyalgia and arthritis. Dance synchronised to music constitutes what neuroscientist John Krakauer has described as “pleasure double-play”: While the music stimulates the brain’s “reward centres”, dance activates the sensory and motor circuits. It helps rewire the brain, encouraging it to build new neural pathways or repair damaged ones. In people suffering from illnesses that inhibit movement, dancing in time to music can thus be especially liberating.

This has always been one of the roles that dance has played in human lives. As much as it is an expression of joy and celebration — even aggression, as seen in Maori haka performances — dance has also healed and served as a reminder of resilience. It is, after all, a three-way negotiation between the mind, the body and the laws of physics, with the first always finding ways to defy the limitations imposed by the other two. As diseases impose their own daunting constraints, dancing becomes a way of tapping back into that defiance. Dance becomes a reminder that illness may reduce the body to a site of failures, but it always remains, first and last, an instrument capable of joy, grace and beauty.