Why Dance? To Maintain Everyday Competence And Stay Fit Physically And Mentally, Study Shows
August 10, 2010
Why dance?
Beyond the joy of bopping to rhythm and staying in shape, a growing tide of research has been pointing to dance’s ability to preserve mental fitness, too.
Now, a new study suggests that following a regular schedule of dancing into old age has far-reaching effects that not only preserve cognitive, motor, and perceptual abilities, but is “a prime candidate for the preservation of everyday life competence of elderly individuals.”
In recent years, dance has been used as a therapeutic tool for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, dementia, obesity in children, and patients with serious mental illness. Most previous studies have focused on its benefit to the cardiovascular health, muscle strengthening, posture, and balance among the elderly.
Using PET scans, neuroscientists have previously shown that dancing activates many areas of the brain and elicits the interaction of wide-spread neural networks. Other studies have shown that repeated physical activities have the ability to reorganize the brain, otherwise known as neuroplasticity, into old age.
“We here went one step further by hypothesizing that year-long dancing activity in an elderly population should promote general advantages including preservation of cognitive, motor and sensorimotor performance as well as perceptual abilities,” according to the study by researchers, led by Jan-Christoph Kattenstroth, at the Neural Plasticity Lab at the Institute for Neuroinformatics, Ruhr-University Bochum.
They studied the impact on 24 amateur dancers, with an average age of 71 and an average of 16.5 years of regular ballroom dancing, compared with a sedentary group of 38 adults, of the same average age, with no record of sports or dancing activities.
“We found that in each of the different levels investigated,” including cognitive, attentional, intellectual, perceptual and sensorimotor performance, the group of amateur dancers performed at a superior level compared with the group of non-dancers.
The advantages of dance, in addition to physical activity, may result from its unique combination of other elements, including engagement of emotions, social interaction, sensory stimulation, motor coordination and music.
Interestingly, in a recent study, experienced adult Tai Chi practitioners demonstrated superior spatial sense and sensitivity of touch, in comparison to matched control subjects. As one explanation, researchers in that study proposed that either individuals with a high fitness are drawn to Tai Chi, or that Tai Chi itself drives cortical changes which lead to superior tactile acuity.
But researchers at the Neural Plasticity Lab suggested that increased levels of neurotrophins, “up-regulated,” or produced, during dancing might also be responsible for the superior tactile acuity seen in Tai Chi practicioners. Neurotrophins are a family of proteins, or growth factors, capable of signaling which neurons, or brain cells, survive, differentiate, or grow.
The group of amateur dancers in the lab’s study scored higher than the passive group in everyday competence, as measured by a everyday competence questionnaire. It looked at various aspects of independent living and mobility, social relations, general health, and contentment.
“Our study provides strong evidence that dance promotes a wide-range of beneficial effects,” the study concluded. “Therefore, dance might be an approach” to maintaining brain health and plasticity and contribute to successful aging.
Tao Porchon-Lynch Turns Age On Its Head With Yoga And Dance
June 7, 2010
Ninety-one year-old yogi and competitive ballroom dancer Tao Porchon-Lynch isn’t balancing herself in front of her classes like a human teeter-totter these days. But that’s only because she recently broke her wrist and isn’t quite ready to put full weight on it, she explained during an early morning class in Hartsdale, New York.
Following her in Down Dog, Half Moon, and Warrior Pose, a gawking visitor half her age was quickly disabused of any doubts. Porchon-Lynch, who was raised in French Pondicherry, India, pretzeled a leg behind her neck and demonstrated how far she’s come since she had a hip replacement in 2003 and despite a surgical pin that was implanted in one leg in the late 1980s. She credits the spinal twists of yoga practice, which she does in the morning with her students and at night before bed, with staying lithe.
CNN video:
Tao Porchon-Lynch
At the time of her injury, skeptical doctors warned, ” ‘You won’t be able to do this, you won’t be able to do that.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to know what I won’t be able to do. I won’t improve that way,’ ” she recalled. A few weeks later, Porchon-Lynch sent a photograph to her physician of herself practicing mayurasana, or peacock pose, balancing her body on her hands, with her nose pointing to the ground and her straight legs arrowing up.
“Just like nature does, you can renew every part of your body,” she tells her students now as she exhorts them in a whispery voice to use their fingers and particularly their “lazy little toes.”
Porchon-Lynch began practicing yoga during her childhood in India, but she didn’t teach her first yoga class until she was in her 40s, and then informally. She didn’t land her first paying gig as a yoga instructor until she was 50, when Jack LaLanne spotted her giving classes at a health club he was buying and offered her $15 a week.
By then, she had already lived a storied life. During World War II, she worked in the Resistance in France with an aunt before escaping to England. She danced London’s nightclubs and acted in shows, cast for parts by Noel Coward, who, she remmebered, taught her English with such phrases as, “I presume that your presumptions are precisely incorrect and your sarcastic insinuations too obnoxious to be appreciated.” A glamorous beauty, she modeled haute couture in post-war Paris, modeled hair permanents for Lever Brothers in the United States, appeared in several Hollywood movies, wrote screenplays and, in the 1960s and 1970s, documentaries in India. She was also hired by UniTel to help establish TV stations in India in the 1960s.
Yoga has not only helped her maintain her flexibility of body and mind, it’s kept her wardrobe costs down. While she may no longer have a 17-inch waist, thanks to her unwavering practice of yoga and her minimalistic vegetarian diet, she can still wear the size 2 dresses of her Parisian youth. “I don’t eat much and I don’t get tired,” she said.
After her Indian mother died in child birth, her French father gave her to his brother and sister-in-law to raise in India. She studied yoga with Indra Devi in Pondicherry and, in Pune, was one of the first women to study under B.K.S. Iyengar, credited with popularizing yoga in the West. Since founding the Westchester Yoga Institute in 1982, she has trained and certified hundreds of instructors. She also maintains a demanding schedule of teaching yoga classes at the Fred Astaire Studio in Hartsdale and the JCC in Scarsdale, NY, giving workshops at such yoga centers as the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, MA, and the Satchidananda Ashram-Yogaville in Buckingham, Va., and leading trips to India and Sri Lanka.
And then there’s competitive dancing. “I dance as much as I can afford to,” said Tao Porchon-Lynch, who will demonstrate the Argentine Tango and other dances with a 22-year-old dance partner on June 12 in Tarrytown, NY, at the Fred Astaire Dance Studios regional New Comers competition. “I’d rather dance than eat. Dancing with someone who likes to dance can make you feel at one. It turns on the energy and lights up your body.”
Anna Halprin Is Breath Made Visible
April 23, 2010
If you want to see what a life infused by dance looks like, take a look at this this trailer of “Breath Made Visible,” the film tribute to nearly 90-year-old West Coast avant garde choreographer Anna Halprin. The adoring documentary directed by former student Ruedi Gerber “captures both the passion and the pioneering spirit” of her revolutionary performances, writes New York Times reviewer Jeannette Catsoulis.
“Inhaling nature and exhaling it in dance, she follows her bliss with whimsical, soul-stirring expressiveness,” according to Catsoulis. She writes that the film “portrays a woman with angels in her feet and innovation in her blood. Long may she rock.” Even this trailer will have you saying, “Amen.” (The complete review: )
” title=“Anna Halprin”>Breath Made Visible
Dance Confronts Coal Country Mountaintop Removal
April 7, 2010
Last night was memorable. Elder dancer Thomas Dwyer and “youngers” Sarah Leavitt and Ben Wegman performed a riveting excerpt of Cassie Meador’s “How To Lose A Mountain,” a dance-in-progress about chance, startled humanity, and mountaintop removal. (And then, stranded in New York, they had a sleepover at my apartment.)
Leavitt, Dwyer, Wegman, and Martha Wittman, in Jan. 2010, in study of "How To Lose A Mountain."
As part of "Dance Conversations" at the Flea Theater in Manhattan, choreographer Cassie Meador, of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, talked about the genesis, environmental issues, and elements of human behavior braided into the work. The opening scene, with Dwyer sitting on a small grade-school chair and peering intensely at a fanned handful of cards and Leavitt grabbing and flinging them, was inspired by family lore in which Meador's grandfather lost ownership of a mountain in a game of poker.
While cards are flying, Joffrey Ballet-trained Ben Wegman explodes around the rest of the space in Meador's exploration of what it means to be startled repeatedly -- as by TNT explosions used in the coal-mining practice of mountaintop removal. The excerpt ends with Dwyer and Leavitt struggling and ultimately embracing atop the little chair, which becomes representative of what little mountain remains.
The dance reminded me of Mari-Lynn Evans’s bluegrass-powered, Emmy-nominated documentary “Coal Country,” which premiered last fall and will air again on Planet Green, on Saturday, April 10, at 6 p.m. ET.
When I told Evans about Meador’s exploration of startling in “How To Lose A Mountain,” she said, “Well, they drop the same amount of TNT onto the Appalachia each week as was in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It makes a whole lot of shaking.”
Emotions are running high in West Virginia after a traumatic week in which twenty-five miners died in a mining disaster in the Upper Big Branch Mine-South in Montcoal, W.Va.—a mine cited more than 3,000 times for federal safety violations. It is operated by Massey Energy, the company on which Evans’s film focuses.
http://www.coalcountrythemovie.com/trailer_page.html
For a closer look at the events on the ground in West Virginia check out Evans’s blog at http://coalcountry.wordpress.com/ or for what is arguably the best reporting on the state’s coal mining go to Ken Ward’s “Coal Tattoo” blog at The Charleston Gazette at http://bit.ly/dbKxre.
Thomas Dwyer and Dance Exchange Make “Language” in Sheboygan
March 13, 2010
For the last three weeks, Thomas Dwyer and his colleagues from the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, have running a community dance workshop and been putting in 12-hour rehearsal days at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Led by choreographer Cassie Meador, they staged a collaborative performance with 60 participants, ages seven to mid-70s, for a performance piece, titled “Language for the Land” this weekend.
During the week, as he readied for his role as naturalist John Muir (who grew up in Wisconsin), Thomas, 75, said the fierce demand of readying for the performance was showing a bit. “We’re getting to crunch point, and that’s sometimes hard for the community, not used to it,” he said. The dance mixed images from Muir’s journals with stories and dancers from the Hmong and Hispanic communities of Sheboygan. After the first performance, everyone exhaled. “Our cast danced beautifully! It was wonderful to see each person really shine,” dancer Sarah Leavitt wrote on the company blog on Saturday. (Photos included: http://dxontheroad.blogspot.com/) When I get a video of the performance, I’ll post it. In the meantime, here’s a beautiful video of Thomas and Martha Wittman performing Meador’s “Drift.”
Unlike Thomas, who never even attempted to dance before his fifty-second birthday, Wittman has been teaching, dancing and choreographing for more than 50 years. As a young performer she danced with the Juilliard Dance Theatre under the direction of Doris Humphrey and in the companies of Ruth Currier, Joseph Gifford and Anna Sokolow. She was a long-term member of the Bennington College dance faculty in Vermont, and has been a guest artist, teacher and choreographer in numerous colleges, universities and summer dance programs around the country. Martha joined the Dance Exchange in 1996.
Drift was commissioned by The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Local Dance Commissioning Project in 2008. The initial concept for the piece was inspired by Meador’s visits to her hometown of Augusta, Georgia, where she found a plot of land that had undergone several transformations: from productive farmland to a strip mall, to a Piggly Wiggly supermarket, and finally to a place of worship – complete with the leftover electronic swinging doors from the Piggly Wiggly.
In the dance, a table turns into a house and a cathedral archway becomes a series of grocery shelves. Objects—grocery carts, tea cups, cereal boxes—drift around the set as the characters, wearing their stories on their bodies, tell their tales.
On the Dance Exchange website, Meador says, “As a choreographer I have always been intrigued by the relationship between the physical and intellectual energy that sustains the artistic process. I place myself in the tradition of artists and scientists who actively engage their cognitive, creative and physical faculties in a multi-faceted process. My own choreographic process is inspired by the rigors of scientific discovery and exploration, by the geologists who hunt, gather, reconstruct and translate the sources and evidence of change in the world.”
(Above, on March 4, Dance Exchange members celebrate Thomas and the publication of my book in Sheboygan.)