Center for Arts in Medicine: Dance for Life
At the University of Florida College of Fine Arts McGuire Theatre and Dance Pavilion, classrooms spill over with the energy of impassioned student dancers and actors practicing to be the very best. The hallways are a cacophony of music, monologues, laughter and the bustling of bodies in motion.
But in this building, the students are not all typical young college students. On Monday afternoons, the halls are also filled with “Dance for Lifers,” people with Parkinson’s disease who come to participate in the Dance for Life program.
Dance for Life is a free weekly dance class for people with Parkinson’s disease and their significant others, as well as UF dance majors. It is a real dance class; not dance made simple for older people, but a class designed to challenge and creatively engage dancers.
Implemented in 2009 by a unique partnership between the UF Center for Arts in Medicine, Shands Arts in Medicine, the UF College of Fine Arts School of Theatre + Dance, and the Center for Movement Disorders and Neurorestoration, the class was inspired by research that demonstrates the potential for dance to reduce the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. Studies over the past several years have been showing that dance may be a very appropriate and effective strategy for improving both the physical and psychological symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, including reduced range of motion, balance and gait initiation challenges, social isolation, and depression.
John Schmidt, who has attended the Dance for Life class at UF since its inception, believes that people with Parkinson’s disease, “need the techniques used by professional dancers to keep their muscles flexible, strong and functional. And we need association with intelligent young college students for their exuberant love of life, belief in the possible, and hope for the future.”
Set in a professional dance studio in the Nadine McGuire Theatre and Dance Pavilion, the class is taught by professional dancers from the faculty of the UF School of Theatre + Dance. The 75-minute class includes seated and standing warm-ups, barre work, and dance repertoire from ballet, modern dance and even Broadway shows. And every 12 weeks, the class hosts a performance or a social event to showcase their dancing and bring more people into the program.
While no one would claim that dancing can cure Parkinson’s disease, people around the world are discovering that it can significantly improve the experience of living with the disease. Dance classes for people with Parkinson’s disease are becoming increasingly common, due to the leadership of this program and of the Mark Morris Dance Group® in Brooklyn, NY. This professional modern dance company has run their Dance for PD program for more than 10 years and has now trained dance professionals to develop programs in more than 40 locations throughout the world. UF hosts an annual training program led by the Mark Morris Dance Group with the hope that more programs will develop in the region so that additional people can have access to the benefits of dance.
There are few prescriptions for the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease that are as fun, inexpensive, and side-effect-free as dancing. And while the empirical data is growing, the best evidence of the effectiveness of these programs may be in the voices of the participants themselves.
Katherine Castle, a UF Dance for Life participant, describes the class as “a weekly gift of love. There is no room for self-pity and sadness in these rooms. Dance for Life stretches my spirit along with my body. It frees me to dance for the sheer joy of being alive. For me, PD has become at worst an inconvenience.”
For more information about Dance for Life, call 352-273-1488 or e-mail jsonke@arts.ufl.edu.
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