Dance and Movement Therapy Project
by
Paola Gamberini
When the project of the course was submitted to us, we immediately wanted to support it and promote it for its obvious training potential. To bring awareness of oneself and of one's own emotions through the body, movements and the activation of sensory resources means offering a precious contribution for the growth of our children and young people, promoting the integrated development of their personalities and stimulating the sensory and motor development on which is based the activation of the representative and imaginative capacity. Together with Prof. Vincenzo Bizzi, who is in charge of the Educational Counselling Service, I followed the whole course interacting efficiently with the facilitator from the preliminary preparatory phase to the shared analysis of the results. The positive control of the activity at various levels has fully confirmed the wealth and the value of this new experience.
Paola Gamberini, Coordinator of the Educational Counselling Service, Istituto Cavazza
The space for dancing
by Liliana
Tamburello
A welcoming space, recognizable and safe. A space in which to enter and from which to exist, in which we can move, in which we can give a form to dancing. A space where we can meet others, in which we can be seen and recognized as a group, but also as individuals and in the expression of ourselves. This is what characterized the laboratory of creative movement, entitled To Feel, Imagine and Create Through the Body, which took place from October 2009 to May 2010 at the Istituto Cavazza's gym. The small group that has followed the course was formed with three visuallly impairment children aged five and six. Bana, Karim and Sara participated right from the beginning and showed their great availability and joy, expressing their pleasure to do things together and to be together. During the course of the meetings, a very intense bond was created among all participants, which led to
very happy moments, but intimate as well as moving.
To set up the activity, I put together a well-defined and safe setting. I carefully structured the physical space of the gym, I chose music and material with precise characteristics and I tried to create a relationship of trust with each child. At the beginning of the course, I thought about proposing to the children activities with the objective of stimulating the exploration of the dancing space's physical limits and relative material, or the perception of the limits of the bodily space. The experimentation and the sharing of these experiences have beated time at each meeting and created recognizable rituals. During the lab, using the techniques of the dance and movement therapy, I proposed to the children to experience movements that would allow them to develop a better knowledge of the pattern of their own body, to then explore various modalities of movements, from touch and hearing, with the help of material and small percussion instruments. In particular, I tried to go through the evolutive movement patterns that children develop from birth until they stand on their own two feet and walk, for example, by crawling, rolling over, jumping, moving while standing in different ways. The experimental movements have allowed children to activate the internal connection that is to act upon the structural chains of the body that internally connect muscles, bones and articulations, and that have a profound resonance at the emotional level. At the same time, I tried to stimulate the kids' creativity, the possibility to give form through movement to one's own personal world made of sensations, emotions, images and thoughts.
My attention was focused on the children's spontaneous movements, which I tried to catch, to name and to reproduce in a way sometimes more structured, to make them more "visible" to the others. This is how we created our dances which were shared and transformed during the course and which allowed each child to symbolically represent the most profound aspects of themselves. I think that this lab offered Bana, Karim and Sara the possibility to experiment a very special dimension. Within a structured space and through the creation of an emotional relationship, it was possible to work on the body and on the movement for each child, but also to stimulate the creative expression individually and as a group.
