Applying Critical Consciousness to Dance/Movement Therapy Pedagogy and the Politics of the Body

Abstract

Dance/movement therapy (DMT) is a profession and cultural community with its own habitus, assumptions, and biases. Because of the profession’s progressive and unique embodied-dance approach to psychotherapy, the lack of social critique of the inherent ‘whiteness’ of its epistemology can be overlooked in the process of education and training of DMT professionals. The DMT norms, that are not explicitly stated, may manifest in practice as unintended oppression of trainees as well as peers. Drawing from critical race feminist theory and critical pedagogy, we offer an embodied dialectical approach to exploring the power dynamics that exist within the field of DMT education and training in the US. We raise case examples of heteropatriarchal European-American epistemology in DMT and offer counternarratives and frameworks for humanizing the admissions process, curriculum, and the facilitation of classes and/or supervision of practica and internship. We believe that a critically conscious DMT education and training opportunity leads to healing, liberation, and celebratory social action.