“… particularly effective therapeutically.”

Abstract

In the 1950s, ‘dancing gymnastics’ as a form of group therapy was introduced in the psychiatric hospital of Schussenried. The new therapy had been developed by a female gymnastics teacher and was taken up by the medical director. This was followed by joint lectures and dance performances with patients for the scientific community. All of this took place in a clinical-therapeutic setting in which notions of treatment and cure had been renegotiated since the testing of the new psychotropic drugs. The article outlines how new approaches were to be conceived, tested and legitimized. Focusing on evidence production, it explores the question of how the effectiveness of dance-based remedial gymnastics was supposed to be staged and made performatively visible in the context of recovery.