Dialogues between Gestalt therapy and dance: body, speech and sense

Abstract

This article discusses the encounter of psychology and art/dance based on reflections arisen from interdisciplinary work in dance workshops for teens in a community of Rio de Janeiro in partnership with an NGO in the region. In interdisciplinary work involving workshops, the focus was on corporeality and subjectivity processes of youth. The theoretical framework was the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the clinic of Gestalt Therapy and the Theory and Foundations of Helenita de Sa Earp Dance. Phenomenology conceives the human experience as spontaneous and expressive action in the world, which produces senses and meanings. Gestalt therapy is a clinical experience which aims to extend the capacity of awareness from the body, allowing a ressignifying of yourself, from the experience and from the world. Art is understood as a living of the body, not as a resource; but a range of possibilities for an aesthetic experience of yourself and the world. In dancing the body is reanimated, decentralized and moved to create senses. The aim of these workshops was to create expressive possibilities based on the experiences that emerge in the field, an expressive work that revolves senses and sedimented meanings, enabling a more critical stance toward automatic and crystallizing reality. The exploration of theoretical frameworks of dance and the gestalt-therapy performed in this work showed important ontological, epistemological, methodological and conceptual affinities which allowed the strengthening, the basis of the dialogue about the practices being developed in workshops with young people in a theoretical point of view.