June 7th, 2026
Dr. Sally Sommer (always “Sal” to me) is an eminent dance critic, historian, and past professor of dance at institutions like Duke and Florida State University. But those titles don’t begin to capture her fire, wit, and brilliance. Sal is the kind of person who can stop a conversation cold with a single observation, then laugh out loud at the shock and awe her statement created. The best sort of teachers know how to completely obliterate your world view in an effort for you to find yourself in the process of recreating it. I was lucky enough to have her as a teacher, mentor, and colleague, and luckier still to have had the conversations that came with that.
Many have never left me.
At one point, we were talking about popularization, and about what happens when something marginal and niche moves into the mainstream. Sal’s specific frame was American vernacular dance, and what scholars call social dance translocation: the process by which dances born inside particular communities migrate outward, into ballrooms, into Broadway, into the cultural mainstream. And what she said (I’ll paraphrase here) was this: that migration is always a reductive process. The form moves, but it moves thin. Something essential – the weight of its origin, the intelligence of its community, the full grammar of its expression – gets left behind. What arrives on the other side is recognizable, and may even be beautiful, but it’s bereft of its soul. It has been translated by people who did not speak the original language. And with translation, however careful, there is always loss.
Then, our conversations were about dance and art. Lately, I’ve been thinking about her work in the context of dance and healthcare.
You may have noticed – dance is having a moment.
In medical and wellness circles alike, there is a flurry of interest in the ways dance is beneficial outside of its identity as an art form. As a dance artist myself, my preferred treatment for the daily ills has always been a hearty dose of boogie. That part, I understand completely.
But as dance is increasingly positioned as a tool to promote mental health, social connection, and rehabilitation after injury, a more important question emerges: who is qualified to administer your specific dose?
Could your daughter’s dance studio be the answer to your gout? Probably not. But the fact that it doesn’t sound entirely absurd tells us something about the current moment. Social media has made expertise feel accessible – and accessibility, it turns out, is very easy to mistake for qualification. Those who are actually qualified to give medical advice tend to do so with restraint. And that restraint? That’s part of the qualification.
We are seeing a significant rise in both research and public enthusiasm around dance as intervention. And as interest grows, so does the risk of diluting the elements that make the interventions medicinal. A local studio owner positioning an adult hip hop class as treatment for cervical radiculopathy (neck pain, plainly) is not a hypothetical I’m reaching for, it’s a thing that is happening. Clinical care requires more than enthusiasm. It demands training, accountability, and the ability to make decisions within the complexity of an individual’s medical history.
Licensure and board certification exist for a reason. And right now, in the warm glow of dance’s prescriptive moment, that reason is getting harder to see.
Let me be clear about something: this argument runs in both directions.
It is easy – and not wrong – to point at clinicians who have discovered dance and begun leading interventions without ever having truly lived inside the form. Without the lineage. Without the years of transmission, slow, inefficient, and utterly un-optimizable, that build the kind of embodied knowledge that cannot be downloaded or certificated into existence. That gap is real and it matters.
But dancers are not innocent here either.
I recall watching a TED Talk – a choreographer and dance professor, clearly brilliant and passionate, discussing neuroplasticity, the sensory system, and the ways dance affects both. It was compelling advocacy, and on its surface, important work. But I found myself sitting with an uncomfortable question: what was his actual literacy level with the science he shared? Could he perform a truly fulsome interpretation of those studies, not just the conclusions, but the methodology, the limitations, the conversation those studies are having with the broader neuroscientific literature? He could speak with authority to the dance and movement elements, absolutely. But the science? That required a different kind of foundation. One that isn’t built in a studio.
Would a dancer tolerate a neuroscientist teaching them about effort, movement quality or dynamics within compositions? I don’t think so. The asymmetry is worth noticing.
Conversely, last year I participated in a class where material was presented on the sensory system, and its effect on the nervous system. The presentation of this material was not what struck me, as the intent was good-natured, it was the absence of recognition that occupational therapists possess specialized expertise in sensory processing, sensory integration theory, and the relationship between sensory information and participation in daily occupations. Sensory processing is not a peripheral interest of occupational therapy, it is part of the board examination and licensure process. Good intentions, in the absence of that awareness, can quietly flatten the very expertise they’re trying to engage.
In both spaces, the same thing was happening. Someone was speaking from the surface of a discipline they had not paid the full price of entry into. And here is what surface knowledge does: it doesn’t just move thin, it stunts. It arrives with just enough confidence to stop the deeper inquiry before it begins. The dancer absorbs three facts about neuroplasticity and stops asking what else the neuroscientist knows. The clinician runs a few dance groups and stops asking what else the form contains.
The surface becomes the ceiling.
And the people who pay that cost most directly are not the practitioners in the room. They are the people that the intervention was designed to serve.
This is not an argument for staying in your lane. It is an argument for appreciating how wide each respective lane actually is. For having the roots to support the reach. Dance is a tradition passed from person-to- person, slowly, through time and significant effort. It cannot be efficiently absorbed. Its process cannot be optimized. Clinical knowledge is built the same way, from a foundation of earned understanding, through rote memorization and relentless testing of thought, until one day the reasoning becomes fluid and a clinical voice emerges. An expression of ideas that belongs to you, because you paid for it through your effort.
Surface knowledge has no such roots. And rootless things, when they move, move thin, and quietly close the door on everything they might have become.
So let’s draw the lines, in order to acknowledge the depth of the respective fields that are utilizing dance in healthcare today.
Arts-in-medicine (AIM) programs bring artists into the healthcare environments to support emotional well-being and quality of life. AIM practitioners are not credentialed and the model doesn’t necessitate clinical outcomes. Dance Movement Therapy is a credentialed mental health profession. Dance Movement Therapists hold the BC-DMT, and use movement as a psychotherapeutic tool within mental health diagnoses. Interventions are medically necessary and outcomes are expected. Last, interdisciplinary rehabilitative practice that a registered occupational therapist, physical therapist, or speech language pathologist may utilize (and where my own work lives) uses dance as a functional method tied to medical diagnosis, measurable outcomes, and medical necessity.
Same medium. Three entirely different intentions. Three entirely different responsibilities.
In rehabilitative practice, and occupational therapy specifically, dance is not the endpoint. It is the method. Movement principles, motor learning, rhythm, sequencing, spatial awareness, and the relational dynamics of shared physical experience are applied toward functional goals. Pt goals are tied to a documented occupational need, and evaluated against outcomes, justified within a framework of medical necessity, accountable to the clinical and reimbursement systems that surround them.
And here, perhaps more than anywhere, the practitioner’s fluency in dance as a living tradition is not incidental. It is load-bearing.
Consider a patient with Parkinson’s disease. The rhythmic structure of partner dance: the external beat, the physical contact, the anticipatory timing required to move with another person, becomes a neurological scaffold for postural stability and movement initiation. The functional goal is walking through a doorway. Getting out of a chair. The dance is a method precise enough, and evidence-based enough, to get the patient there. But it is the practitioner’s embodied understanding of how rhythm lives in the body, not as a metronome, but as a shared, relational, physical experience, that determines whether the intervention reaches its full therapeutic depth or remains a well-intentioned exercise.
The clinical reasoning selects the intervention. The dance knowledge makes it true.
Dr. Sally Sommer taught me that when a dance form moves from its community of origin into the mainstream, it arrives recognizable. It may even arrive beautiful, but something essential has been left behind in the translation. What travels is the shape. What stays behind is the soul.
That loss is quiet. It doesn’t announce itself. And that, more than anything, is what makes it dangerous.
We are at that moment with dance in healthcare.
As the research multiplies, the enthusiasm will continue to grow. The workshops will proliferate, the TED Talks will find their audiences, and the studio owners will begin to speak the language of neuroplasticity. The form is always moving. And in that crossing, something is at risk of being left behind that no credential can recover.
The moment when the feeling becomes movement.
When the body speaks its language.
The soul of the dance is the medicine.
–tennille
