One of the research projects that has stayed with me was Dancing With Health, a European research project exploring the use of Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) with women who had experienced breast cancer.
I was one of a team of three Dance Movement Psychotherapists who facilitated the Liverpool arm of the project. My role involved taking the movement-based protocols developed for the research programme and translating them into a therapeutic experience that could respond to the women who were actually in the room.
That process of translation was important. Research needs structure and consistency so that an intervention can be studied, but therapy also needs to be responsive to the people taking part. Their bodies, experiences, relationships and emotional responses cannot be reduced to a protocol.
From dance intervention to therapeutic practice
The Dancing With Health programme originated as a dance-based intervention developed within a European research project. For the Liverpool study, the movement material was adapted for delivery as Dance Movement Psychotherapy.
For me, this meant thinking carefully about what happened when structured movement became part of a therapeutic process.
Dance can bring attention to the body in a very immediate way. For someone who has been through breast cancer, that relationship with the body may have changed considerably. Treatment can alter appearance, strength, sensation, mobility and confidence. The body may also carry memories of illness, treatment and uncertainty.
Movement therefore isn’t simply about becoming more physically active. It can provide an opportunity to explore how it feels to inhabit the body now.
Within DMP, movement can become a form of communication. It can offer possibilities for expression when words are difficult, and can allow experiences to be noticed, explored and shared without requiring someone to explain everything verbally.
Listening to the body
One of the things I value about Dance Movement Psychotherapy is the invitation to become curious about bodily experience.
This doesn’t mean that there is a particular movement that is supposed to produce a particular emotional outcome. Nor does it mean interpreting someone’s movement as though it were a code that can be deciphered.
Instead, it is about paying attention.
How does it feel to move today?
What happens when I make a movement bigger or smaller?
Where do I feel comfortable, and where do I feel hesitant?
What happens when I move with other people?
What changes when I allow myself to take up a little more space?
These may seem like simple questions, but they can open up quite complex experiences.
After cancer treatment, reconnecting with the body may involve both physical and emotional dimensions. Movement can provide a gentle way of beginning that process, without demanding that someone immediately find words for everything they have experienced.
The importance of adaptation
The project also reinforced something that has remained important throughout my practice: a therapeutic intervention needs to be adapted to the people who are actually participating in it.
The women taking part were not simply research participants who needed to complete a series of movements. They brought their own histories, bodies, relationships and experiences of cancer.
Some movements would feel accessible to one person and challenging to another. Some might evoke confidence, while others might bring awareness of vulnerability or limitation.
As therapists, we therefore needed to remain attentive to what was happening in the room and to the different ways people responded to the movement.
This is one of the places where I see a valuable relationship between research and clinical practice. Research gives us a framework for asking whether an intervention is helpful. Therapeutic practice reminds us that the experience of that intervention is always personal.
What did the research find?
The findings from the Dancing With Health study were encouraging.
The research found improvements in physical measures, including anthropometric measures and aspects of physical fitness. There were also psychosocial benefits for women with breast cancer, and the quality-of-life measure indicated positive changes following the intervention.
These findings matter because they suggest that a movement-based therapeutic intervention can have effects across more than one dimension of wellbeing.
But for me, the value of the project isn’t captured by outcome measures alone.
A person’s experience of their body after cancer is not simply a number on a scale or a fitness measure. Physical changes and psychological experience are interconnected. Feeling stronger may affect confidence. Feeling more comfortable moving may change how someone relates to their body. Being part of a group may provide connection and a sense of being understood.
These things don’t necessarily sit neatly in separate categories of physical and psychological health.
What I took from the project
Working on Dancing With Health strengthened my interest in the space between movement, physical health and psychological experience.
It also reinforced my belief that embodied psychotherapy cannot be understood simply as talking therapy with some movement added to it.
Movement changes the way we experience ourselves. It can bring us into contact with sensation, emotion, memory, relationship and environment. Sometimes something becomes possible through movement that wasn’t accessible through words alone.
At the same time, I don’t think movement should be presented as a universal solution. The body can be a source of pleasure and possibility, but it can also be a source of pain, fear, vulnerability and difficult memories. Embodied work needs to be approached with sensitivity and choice.
That balance — between inviting exploration and respecting the person’s boundaries — is central to therapeutic movement practice.
From research into ongoing practice
Looking back, Dancing With Health was significant for me not only because of the findings of the research, but because of the questions it raised.
How do we translate a structured intervention into something that feels genuinely therapeutic?
How do we hold the consistency required by research while remaining responsive to individual experience?
How can movement support someone whose relationship with their body has been profoundly changed by illness?
And how might we understand physical and psychological wellbeing as interconnected rather than as separate domains?
These are questions that have continued to inform my practice.
My work now spans Dance Movement Psychotherapy, embodied and somatic approaches, movement practices, teaching and research. I remain particularly interested in the places where these areas overlap — and in what we can learn when we resist putting body and mind, physical and psychological health, or different therapeutic modalities into entirely separate boxes.
Dancing With Health was one of the projects that helped me begin to explore those connections more deeply.
Further reading: The research findings from the Dancing With Health study were published in Frontiers in Psychology: Dancing With Health: A Randomized Controlled Trial of the Effects of Dance Movement Therapy on Physical and Psychological Outcomes in Women With Breast Cancer.