Embodied Pathways to Healing: Accessing the Neuromyofascial Web in Dance/Movement Therapy

Abstract

The dance space is the warming hearth of the dancer’s heart and the active landscape in which the moving body plays, feels, and apprehends. This practice-led research study emerged from this somatic landscape assembling itself into a work choreographed around the motif of the neuromyofascial web as the architecture of the physical body and the conservator of its emotional life. A depth psychological perspective is employed to examine the fascial web’s influence on the retrieval of psychoactive content supporting the dance/movement therapy participant’s individuative process. The neuromyofascial web is explored through its restorative dynamics, stabilizing the physical body and releasing transformational content within the emotional body through the informing power of authentic movement. The tensegral nature of architectural design and the biotensegrity of the neuromyofascial web are evaluated as a therapeutic complement to the activities of dance/movement therapy, expanding the application of its principal protocols. A psychophysical analysis of the methodologies employed by American modern dance pioneers reveals their instinctual reliance on the neuromyofascial web and affirms authentic movement’s ancestral roots employed in the depth family of somatic therapies available today. Aspects of practice led research inspired a diagrammatic representation of the defining elements within kinesthetic experience and encouraged the creation of a movement manual for dance/movement therapists supporting the integration of movement and meaning.