Join me in welcoming Jan Dunn who is going to be with us this year writing about Dance Wellness. Ms. Dunn has an extremely impressive background in the field and I’m really excited that she will be sharing her insights with us here at 4dancers… 

by Jan Dunn, MS

 

Welcome to the world of Dance Wellness!  (also sometimes called “Dance Medicine and  Science”).  Dance Wellness is a fairly recent branch on the dance family tree; thirty-five years ago, the field did not exist at all. But the last three decades have witnessed tremendous growth in our knowledge of how to keep dancers dancing,  longer and stronger than ever before.  This is the first in a series of on-going articles about dance wellness, integrating recently learned information to help teachers, dancers, choreographers, and directors.

What IS “dance wellness”, or “dance medicine and science”?   The “dance medicine” part is comparable to sports medicine – the care and prevention of dance injuries – just as sports medicine serves the same function for its participants.  “Dance science” draws on research in the last thirty years (most of it in dance itself, as opposed to sports or other fields) from such areas as:

• kinesiology and anatomy
• biomechanics
• exercise physiology
• motor learning
• nutrition
• psychology

Both areas are concerned primarily with how dance injuries can be prevented / minimized, and how to integrate these findings into dance training. “Dance wellness” incorporates all of these concepts — i.e., keeping dancers healthy, to be able to have long, viable careers with decreased risk of injury. [Read more…]