Dancing at the edge. Finding home. Reflections on movement practice and personal loss

Abstract

This article offers a personal account of loss and how improvised movement in a studio and outdoors offered sacred holding through grieving. The author shares vivid descriptive accounts of dancing through grief, ‘at the edge’ as she calls it; yielding to gravity and meeting the stories, memories and emotions that flooded and engulfed her in the wake of the loss of her mother. Losing a loved one is an existential experience all of us must face one day. This intimate presentation of the author’s experience invites the reader to consider how looking death and traumatic loss in the face, turning to empathy and compassion for ourself and to an embodied ecological practice, cracks us open and creates the ground for a reconfiguration of self. Such a sensory arriving to the power of the more-or-other-than human may serve us professionally, she argues, at times of overwhelm such as those we are living through currently.

Keywords:

• Movement improvisation
• outdoors
• grieving
• gravity
• compassion for self
• sacred

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Céline Butté

Céline Butté is an UKCP and ADMP UK Registered Dance Movement Psychotherapist and Supervisor, Teacher, Practice-led Researcher and Dancer.