A Doctor Writes

It provides people with benefits to health and well being, it makes people feel great and watching dance can make you smile or weep. Thousands of people have told me why they dance or don’t dance. These stories are deeply personal and reveal that dance can play a central part in people’s lives – in a good and bad way.

Lots of people tell me that for them dance is like breathing or that they only feel truly alive when they dance. As a psychologist I think these feelings suggest that dance, and the absence of dance, plays an important part in people’s lives.

I’ve presented my findings about dance in many different formats. For the Fringe I’ve made the show fun, interactive, varied and informative. It's not a straightforward lecture, it's not a pure dance performance: I have left out all the graphs and equations.

I talk about and interactively demonstrate four things in the show: how dance and thinking are related; how we recognise emotions through dance- at the end of this section we have a different live dance performance each night – in the final week of the fringe Anthony Middleton, who is a member of the Ballet Boyz company, will be dancing three new works created for the show; how freestyle dance is thought to be related to our genetic and hormonal make up; how dance is related to health. Its a fun, informative show that is accessible to all.