The Body Can Speak: Essays on Creative Movement Education with Emphasis on Dance and Drama (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Body Can Speak: Essays on Creative Movement Education with Emphasis on Dance and Drama Henderson Heidi The Body Can Speak: Essays on Creative Movement Education with Emphasis on Dance and Drama. Edited by Annelise Mertz. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002; pp. xiv + 148. $40.00 cloth, $20.00 paper. In The Body Can Speak, edited by distinguished dance educator Annelise Mertz, a collection of writers contributes to a celebration of the value of movement in education. Most of the authors are Mertz's colleagues and former students and find their commonality in the educational philosophies that Mertz set forth in her tenure as dance department chair at Washington University in St. Louis. Collectively, the writers—dancers, choreographers, improvisers, painters, actors, playwrights, directors, and therapists—argue that creative movement education helps us to define our notions of art and self. Individually, they take very different paths toward this end. Mertz has organized the essays into two categories. "As We See It" covers theory, while in "How We Do It"the various authors discuss process and application. Rarely, however, does an essay fall easily into one or the other of these categories; most are too complex to conform to such explicit definition. In the theory division, for example, Ruth Grauert, editor of the Web-based Journal of Art and Ideas, writes about the compelling work that she does at a camp in Maine where children study music, visual art, dance, poetry, and theatre. Grauert is interested in interdisciplinary artistic processes, and hinting at how she might describe such creative intersections to her young students, suggests, "perhaps having a tantrum is all the arts put together: sound and motion and words; and you are bound to turn red, and of course with a tantrum there is contrast, so we have theater" (16). Grauert's essay is informed by both educational theory and practical experience. Her enthusiasm for working with children and her concrete examples of how she connects art to the natural world of the forests and lakes of Maine offer vivid lessons for teaching. Grauert's essay is also a valuable reminder that artistic education is necessary to a child's development. She asserts, "Our participation in life must lead us to art, and art in turn will lead us to what we truly are" (16). Two of the more clearly theoretical essays are written by pioneering dance educators, whose careers parallel Mertz's own in fostering dance education at the university level. In "Education Through Dance," reprinted from Dance: A Creative Art Experience (1957), Margaret N. H'Doubler, the first woman to institute a dance program at the university level, describes an education in dance as "a special way of reexperiencing aesthetic values discovered in reality" (13). An essay by Dorothy M. Vislocky, professor emerita at Hunter College, is a lovely, reverential, and rambling tribute to her mentor Alwin Nikolais, who in the dance [End Page 500] world is remembered as much for his generosity in teaching as for his work in performance. These essays reflect on the power that teachers have to influence their students both in and out of the classroom. Some of the collection's most interesting essays focus on teaching movement ideas to specific populations, including several essays about teaching dance to children. In "Moving into Belonging: The Dance of the Mother and Child," Becky Engler-Hicks describes her work teaching parents to support the young child's growing ideas of self through movement. In "Spring Celebration: A Movement Ritual for Children,"Jeff Rehg gives a simple and explicit set of instructions for staging a circle dance with children. The children, in practice and in performance, run and chant. They honor the four directions. They create a circle and explore the community the shape implies. In learning and performing this dance, the children solidify their connection to the earth and to each other. One of the most moving and practical essays in the book is by Branislav Tomich, a former student of Mertz. He describes his process of teaching a mix of dance and theatre to a group of incarcerated teens. Tomich uses the lessons of an acting class to teach...