Dancing Dialogue

Before toddlers can name a feeling, they live it through their bodies. A sudden burst of spinning. A leg shaking under the table. Going completely still in a new room. These are not behaviors to manage. They are first drafts of feeling, written in motion.

When caregivers respond with curiosity instead of correction, toddlers learn something quietly powerful: their inner world is welcome here. What they feel is knowable. Someone is paying attention.

What movement does your little one make when big feelings arrive?

The body remembers what words cannot always say.

On Saturday, Dr. Suzi Tortora closed out her week at Codarts with a workshop on how adverse childhood experiences live in the body, and how dance/movement therapy can meet that imprint with safety, attunement, and embodied repair.

The room was full of students, faculty, and visiting clinicians from across Europe and beyond. Dance/movement psychotherapy is the psychotherapeutic use of movement, body awareness, and embodied communication to foster healing for individuals, families, and communities. When clinicians learn to read the body as language, the body becomes a place where childhood imprints can finally be witnessed and supported toward integration.

Thank you to Codarts and to every clinician in the room for the depth and care you brought to this work.

Nine cohorts. Fourteen years.

This past week, Dr. Suzi Tortora returned to Rotterdam to teach the second-year students at Codarts, where she has been on the faculty since 2012. This year's cohort brought together students from Spain, Portugal, Croatia, Romania, Germany, the Netherlands, Israel, Poland, Slovakia, Italy, Norway, and India.

Pictured with Suzi are two extraordinary colleagues. On the left, Nicki Wentholt, the founding director who first invited Suzi to join the program in 2012. On the right, Simone Kleinlooh, the current director continuing that legacy.

What happens in these rooms is the living transmission of dance/movement psychotherapy across generations and borders. To our students, thank you for the depth and curiosity you bring to this work.

For over two decades, dance/movement therapy has been part of the healing journey for children with cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Our founder, Dr. Suzi Tortora, started the dance/movement therapy program in pediatrics at MSK in January 2003. She trained our associate Jennifer Whitley, who has now been part of the team for over 12 years. Together, they work within the Department of Integrative Medicine and Wellness Services.

In 2021, Dr. Tortora co-authored a journal article through the Society of Integrative Oncology that helped establish a formal definition for Pediatric Integrative Oncology: a relationship-centered, evidence-informed approach to caring for the whole child and family system through mind and body practices alongside conventional treatment.

Supporting children and families through medical illness is a specialty we are proud to offer at Dancing Dialogue.

Read the full article here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ctim.2021.102678