Course introduces students to dance, movement therapy

Rena Kornblum dumps three bags of multicolored scarves on the dance studio floor. Take one and make it move, she tells her students.

With a touch of tentativeness, they begin to comply. Kornblum, meanwhile, puts on some light, festive music.

Within moments, the initial apprehensions melt away. The studio blooms into a kaleidoscope of bodies twirling and gliding across the floor, maneuvering delicate wisps of color throughout the room.

Gently prodded by Kornblum, individuals begin working in pairs and trios, exploring ways to work with their scarves. Groupings keep expanding until everyone converges into a single circle of undulating arms, hands and scarves.

Switching the music to something more contemporary sets the circle moving to a new beat. After a few more minutes, the exercise wraps up.

Props and music can influence how we move, explains Kornblum afterward. How we move, in turn, can affect how we feel.

Welcome to today’s lesson in “Introduction to Dance/Movement Therapy.”

Dance/movement therapy — the focus of the Dance Program’s new certificate program for non-dance majors — uses creative and everyday movement to help individuals learn more about themselves and their interactions with others. This includes those who are generally healthy and those dealing with emotional, mental or physical issues.

Dance therapists use activities that might appear frivolous to uninitiated observers to serve serious, beneficial purposes.

Foe example, Kornblum, a registered and licensed dance/movement therapist, uses scarves in group and individual sessions with children who struggle with anger issues. Working with a prop gives individuals an external focus, which helps to decrease self-consciousness and allows for safe expression of strong feeling.

“You can let out your anger with scarves and not hurt anything,” she says.

During the class discussion, the students report that the activity made them feel graceful and that the colors energized them, and they expressed surprise about how many things you can do with a scarf.

Kornblum has been teaching the introductory class as a Dance Program offering for years. Now, her students — 24 are enrolled — have a new option, introduced this fall, for taking their exploration of this field further.

Aimed at non-dance majors, the Certificate for Introductory Studies in Dance/Movement Therapy includes a dance/movement therapy sequence and several dance courses during four semesters.

Kornblum’s classes also have a service component, which students can fulfill by working in schools and at the Hancock Center for Movement Arts and Therapy, a nonprofit organization that promotes the effective use of dance/movement therapy.

Kornblum, the Hancock Center’s executive director, is known for her work with children on violence prevention. She wrote “Disarming the Playground: Violence Prevention through Movement” (2002), a school-based violence prevention curriculum widely used in dance/movement therapy programs.

Her work takes her into local schools, where she uses creative activities and approaches to engage children in non-threatening ways. For instance, she sometimes communicates with children by improvising songs about what they are doing.

Instead of lecturing that feeling anger is wrong, Kornblum tells children that “anger is something that tells us what we don’t like.” Then she works with them to find appropriate ways to express their anger.

She teaches them the four B’s of self-control: brakes (catch the wildness and stop), breathing (deep, abdominal breaths), brains (tell yourself that you are calming down) and body (feel your body get calm and quiet).

Children coming to her sessions quickly learn that “here’s a place where you can be yourself with all your feelings,” she says.

At UW–Madison, she also teaches courses in ballroom dancing and relaxation and exercise, as well as music and movement at the Preschool Laboratory in the university’s School of Human Ecology.

Kornblum developed the dance certificate to expose students to the field and to begin to prepare those who might want to pursue the graduate study necessary to become a dance therapist.

But she emphasizes that the dance/movement therapy classes aren’t just for would-be therapists. Students learn skills and knowledge that can prove useful in a wide variety of pursuits, she says.

Dance/movement therapy classes address how movement can be used in fields that deal with violence prevention, behavior management and social skills development. The classes attract undergraduate and graduate students majoring in a variety of subjects, including teacher-preparation, special education, rehabilitation psychology, communication disorders, social work, physical and occupational therapy, medicine, engineering, and business.

Exposure to dance/movement therapy also has personal benefits.

“It sensitizes people to nonverbal communication,” Kornblum says. This can help students become more aware of how their own nonverbal communication affects their relationships and career goals.

She describes her courses as experiential with an academic foundation. She takes a flexible approach to teaching — much like a therapist must do in working with clients.

“I have clear goals and just change how I reach these goals from semester to semester,” she says. “I let the students inspire me to restructure the class.”

Prior to the scarves activity, Kornblum decides to introduce another exercise she uses. She has the students line up in pairs, facing each other, arms raised and palms touching.

Push, she tells them.

“Pressing hard is a way to self-settle,” she says. “Joint compression is self-calming.”

She uses this exercise with children, for instance in her anti-bullying sessions. With children, she usually has them push against a wall or with the therapist, not with each other.

The pushing-hands exercise helps people feel grounded, and gives them a sense of control. Two-person pushing also conveys the importance of balance, showing that good relationships involve give and take.