Medicine: Dance Therapy

Polka-dot curtains brightened the windows, and red valentines fluttered from the walls. But there was only blankness or despair on the faces of the score of patients who shuffled one day last week into a recreation room at the Federal Government's St. Elizabeths Hospital for the mentally ill in Washington, B.C. Schizophrenics who had been hospitalized for a year or more, they drifted silently in their own private worlds. One man was racked with uncontrollable tremors. Another lifted his head as if to hearken to inner voices.

Then a greying, grandmotherly woman wearing dancing slippers put a Strauss waltz on the phonograph and went to work. As always, the goal for Marian Chace, 62, the nation's leading dance therapist, was to make contact with the mentally ill, through music and movement.

"Beat Me Up." She started slowly, encouraging her patients to make hand movements in time to the music. To help them work off hostility, she put on a polka and danced from man to man, staging mock punching battles to the bouncing beat. "You can really beat me up," she cried breathlessly. "Yes, I can feel anger too!" After half an hour, everyone was trying to dance, even the tremulous man who could do little but rub his hands together. The session ended with a slow waltz that lulled the patients with a soothing, cradling motion.

Although she had seemingly accomplished her aim ("My job is to make a crack-through"). Therapist Chace knew full well that the effects of the session might be fleeting. But psychiatrists who have watched her strike some response in the minds of mental patients, are convinced of the value of her work. Dancing with her, patients sometimes cry out, "This is me!" Says St. Elizabeths' Superintendent Winfred Overholser: "There is no question but that Miss Chace's dance therapy is one means of bringing patients back to reality."

Although she is most successful with schizophrenics, Dancer Chace works with all kinds of mental patients, twice a week goes into the wards. She allows her patients full freedom in dancing out their emotions (one woman smashed the record when an aide forced her into a formal polka). When a combative patient makes a menacing advance, she may win him over by sinking to the floor and smiling, to show that she is no threat. The breakthrough may take weeks, e.g., not until two months after she had asked one patient if he had studied dancing did he break his silence to reply, "No, Miss Chace."

"The Great Pleasures." Rhode Island-born Marian Chace grew up in Washington after her newsman father switched from the Providence Journal to the Washington Star. She once studied with Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn, has taught dancing all her adult life. In the mid-'30s Washington psychiatrists began sending her children who were having difficulty in school or at home. In 1942, after she had had some success, Dr. Overholser invited her to work at St. Elizabeths as the first U.S. dance therapist. At that time, most psychiatrists felt that it was impossible to work in groups with acute schizophrenics. Says she: "I didn't think it would be useful. Then I found myself getting interested."