Healing Moves: UM Offers New Pre-Dance Therapy Concentration

Seely Garrett (right), one of the first students in UM’s new Pre-Dance Therapy Concentration, works with participant Liam Mulcaire-Jones in New Visions Dance class. (Photos by Ridley Hudson)

By Cary Shimek, UM News Service

MISSOULA – One magical moment can change the trajectory of a life. Take what happened to Seely Garrett.

As a high student in Helena, Garrett assisted with a dance program for people of all abilities. She helped with a Cohesion Dance Project production called “Nutcracker on the Rocks,” and one of the performers was a 9-year-old girl struggling with worsening muscular dystrophy.

“There came a moment where she goes across the stage, and she is supposed to present her right arm and then her left arm,” Garrett said. “And the performance gave her this adrenaline, and she rode her little wheelchair out there, and there came the biggest arm movement we had seen from her in a year.”

Garrett’s voice hitches a little from the memory.

“For those of us in the know – who had worked with her – we were all on stage tearing up,” she said. “It felt very special to witness this person who might not always have the chance to perform in things like that. We saw her actually getting stronger through her dance. It was powerful to see.”

Such inspiration fueled Garrett, now a junior at the University of Montana, to become one of the first students to take a new concentration in Pre-Dance Therapy. Like pre-med, this new academic offering preps students for further studies beyond their undergraduate years.

The concentration launched fall semester with five students in the first cohort. The architects of the new offering are two dance faculty members, Professor Heidi Jones Eggert and Assistant Professor Brooklyn Draper of UM’s College of the Arts and Media.

“People need to understand that dance is a healer,” Eggert said. “We have folks who come in and have physical limitations and maybe don’t communicate verbally as easily as the rest of us. But you get the music going and the juices flowing, and suddenly they make eye contact when they wouldn’t make eye contact before. Something just ignites in them. Or their range of movement is really limited, but after 10 to 15 minutes of having fun with music and movement, they are just swinging their arms.”

Like any good dance professor, Eggert speaks with her hands when she talks – especially when excited about a topic. For the past dozen years, she has taught New Visions Dance, a UM therapeutic program that offers dance and creative movement classes to adults with varying developmental, cognitive and physical abilities. The innovative class has existed at UM for the past quarter century, when it was started by the now-retired Karen Kaufman.

All UM dance therapy students are required to co-teach New Visions Dance – as Garrett does on Mondays during spring semester – as well as assist with UM Children’s Dance Classes.

Draper said it was dance students helping with programs like News Visions Dance who consistently pushed for the new Pre-Dance Therapy concentration and potential careers as dance movement therapists. She said they just felt so good after the classes and saw how meaningful such programs could be for those involved.

“Those students coming out of those dance classes, they would say, ‘I’m sad that not everyone has this, and I need to take this out into the world,’” Eggert said. “It was amazing to reflect that these 18- to 22-year-olds wanted others to have these opportunities.”

Some of those students, who earned a Bachelor of Arts in dance from UM, went on to graduate school in dance therapy. Draper and Eggert used the guidance and feedback from these recent alumni to help design the new concentration.

“Just a few institutions across the country are doing anything like this at the undergraduate level,” Draper said. “It’s just very few, but it’s going to grow. The awareness is expanding.”

The Pre-Dance Therapy concentration offers all the prerequisites needed to qualify for a graduate program in dance/movement therapy. The nearest such program is Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, and there are a few more on the East Coast. International graduate programs also are available.

The interdisciplinary concentration combines dance and psychology curriculums. Draper said classes such as Dance as a Healing Art and the Science of Dance are essential, and students are required to take targeted psychology courses and a variety of dance forms.

“We encourage them to take diverse offerings,” Draper said. “We want them to dip their toes in all areas.”

Though the concentration readies students for future study in graduate school, it also immediately prepares them for community work using dance therapy after their undergraduate studies.

“It preps students beautifully to take these classes into community centers and old folks’ homes or schools,” Eggert said. “It trains them with this mindset that movement can bring us together as a community.

“I truly think this makes studying dance in college more accessible,” she said. “Because previously it was training to be a dancer, performer, choreographer or even a teacher. And there is a presumption that one needs a certain background or certain body type or whatever. But this allows people to study dance for different reasons. You might not get hired as a professional dancer, but you can find a job teaching and helping spread this joy.”

Garrett double-majors in both psychology and dance (with a Pre-Dance Therapy concentration) and is still deciding her future path. Among her options are becoming a school psychologist or continuing on to study dance/movement therapy in graduate school.

“I think being a school psychologist would be amazing, because Heidi and Brooklyn, and the other amazing professors in Pre-Dance Therapy have given me something in my toolbox that I can bring out to work with students and kids at any school.”

She said dance therapy is a unique discipline to study.

“Most universities don’t have it, and I have it right here in my home state,” Garrett said. “I think of how special that is.”

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Contact: Heidi Jones Eggert, UM dance professor, 406-243-2072, heidi.eggert@umontana.edu; Brooklyn Draper, UM dance assistant professor, 406-243-4481, brooklyn.draper@umontana.edu

Seely Garrett works with multiple dancers.
Seely Garrett (far left) helps Connie Lewis (center) and others participating in UM's New Visions Dance class.