Healthy dance, sick dance

Sigmund Freud and Joseph Goebbels both became concerned with dance as symptom. The question they asked of dance was whether it conveyed a healthy state of mind or the opposite. There the similarity stops. After reading an essay on inhibited movement by young Edwin Denby (who became America’s great dance critic), Freud began to considered dance from the perspective of a medical diagnostician. Goebbels dealt with dance dictatorially, suppressing any that seemed sickly. Judith Lynne Hanna, in her new book Dancing for Health (www.altamirapress.

com / PO Box 317, Oxford OX2 9RU, UK), stands on the shoulders of not only Denby and Freud but also of the dancer-theorist Rudolf von Laban and medical anthropologists such as Charles Leslie who used dance to heal the ill. Hanna’s view is wide. It encompasses extremes: the religious celibate for whom the execution of ritual motions like genuflection and prostration or of hopping and shaking dances helps to sublimate the sex drive, as well as the ambitious show dancer who flaunts his or her sex appeal at an audition for a Broadway musical. Hanna can also be deep. The three stories she tells of black children using dance to express themselves ...