ENGLISH VERSION

Much More Than Moving: On Art Therapy and Dance

Translation by Tiffany Amber Elías Trimble

Once again, nothing new: under the pretext of accessibility and well-being, artistic practices are transformed into mere instruments of affective complacency and social control, diluting their potential to expand human knowledge and—needless to say—to challenge ontological limits. Thus, faced with the massive proliferation of approaches that reduce art to a cathartic expressive form, aligned with commercial demands in a plethoric market, a deep analysis becomes necessary—unpleasant, they say—one that distinguishes its therapeutic benefits—such as emotional release and improved resilience in clinical contexts—from its negative consequences: the impoverishment of artistic quality, the erosion of serious critique, and the promotion of mass adolescentization. This is evidenced emphatically in the plastic and performing arts, where works become self-help products, and particularly in dance, degraded to mere recreational movement that loses its eloquence as a challenging corporeal language. To fully understand this degradation, it is first necessary to examine the general phenomenon of art therapy and, subsequently, to establish a fundamental distinction between baile (recreational/social dance) and danza (artistic dance) that allows us to appreciate what is at stake.

[Art Therapy]

The mass diffusion of art therapy, which employs artistic expressive means for therapeutic purposes, has gained ground as an accessible tool for managing emotional disorders, clearly distinguishing itself from art in its challenging institutional dimension. In its meaning as ars—expressive technique and form of catharsis—it operates with plastic, scenic, or bodily materials not to dialectically challenge reality, but to facilitate affective release, self-exploration, and emotional integration. This offers palpable benefits in clinical and educational contexts: it promotes the expression of repressed emotions, improves interpersonal relationships, and reduces symptoms of anxiety and depression in diverse populations—from adults with mental disorders to adolescent refugees—by providing verbal and non-verbal channels to process particularly difficult experiences. Meta-analytic reviews confirm that therapy through forms of visual expression, for example, is associated with improvements in at least 18% of patient outcomes, including greater self-knowledge, social connection, and emotional regulation. In cancer contexts, to give another example, it alleviates anxiety and raises quality of life by allowing a narrative elaboration of painful experiences. These advantages extend to school settings, where artistic interventions improve self-esteem, problem-solving, and attitudes towards mental health. Applied with professional rigor, therapy through artistic expression (as it should be called to avoid confusion with artistic endeavor, which is much more than mere technique) can complement conventional treatments without pretending to replace them, provided its limit is recognized: it does not generate new knowledge, but reorganizes subjective experiences for individual well-being.

However, its massive expansion carries profound negative consequences for art as an institution. By prioritizing therapeutic catharsis over rational questioning, it contributes to a general impoverishment of the artistic field, where the work ceases to be an eloquent text that challenges concepts to become a mere vehicle of affective complacency, aligned with commercial demands that privilege the accessible and comforting over critical complexity. Thus, although useful for mitigating specific sufferings, expressive therapy fosters the destruction of serious critique by blurring the boundaries between artistic creation and amateur exercise, replacing dialectical rigor—which forces a re-examination of the material world in its corporeal, sensible, and rational modes—with subjective validation that avoids uncomfortable confrontations. This impoverishes cultural quality and adolescentizes the population by promoting a perpetual search for immediate emotional gratification, to the detriment of the intellectual maturity that arises from confronting conceptual limits. It is well known that the intelligent approach to a work of art—the application of rationality and educated sensibility—can easily generate additional anxiety or activate unresolved emotions. By inserting itself into a market that monetizes well-being, art therapy facilitates subtle population control, where art is reduced to a consumable product that pacifies dissent instead of amplifying it, aligning with turbo-capitalist dynamics that turn creative expression into a self-help industry.

In the plastic arts, this trend accelerates the transformation of practices like painting or sculpture into tools for personal restoration. The emphasis on the expressive process over the final product dilutes standards of quality and institutional critique, favoring ephemeral and sentimental works that sell as remedies for modern stress, or mere provocations, rather than as challenges to reality. Critical reviews highlight how, by incorporating recycled materials or simple techniques in therapeutic contexts, the focus shifts from formal innovation—characteristic of art that questions categories—towards mere catharsis. This, while empowering marginalized individuals by allowing them to narrate traumas, ultimately trivializes the medium by prioritizing individual healing over collective impact, resulting in a proliferation of low-demand artistic products that flood galleries and digital markets. This phenomenon, aggravated by somatic approaches linking artistic practice to bodily awareness, implicitly critiques the tradition of serious critique by equating art with any expressive act, ruining levels of excellence by democratizing it uncritically.

In the performing arts, the therapeutic turn imposes a cathartic lens that reduces theater and dance to means of emotional release. Thus, they become exercises in group healing that prioritize affective complacency over dialectical conflict. This orientation, although beneficial for processing collective traumas, generates risks such as unsatisfactory therapeutic relationships or inappropriate use of art that intensifies emotional disappointments. Complex narratives are diluted in favor of simplified catharses that align productions with commercial demands for therapeutic entertainment. This impoverishment manifests in the destruction of serious critique, where reviews and analyses give way to subjective assessments of «well-being,» ruining technical and conceptual demands, and facilitating social control that channels dissident energies towards harmless self-exploration.

[Baile and Danza]

To understand the specificity of what is lost in the case of dance, it is necessary first to establish the distinction between baile and danza. Although often used interchangeably, they respond to etymological and historical differences that reveal distinct conceptions of bodily practice. Baile is associated with spontaneous and recreational expression, while danza implies an artistic, ritual, or institutional structuration that challenges material reality.

Etymologically, baile comes from Vulgar Latin ballare (from Greek ballizein, «to jump» or «move rhythmically»), denoting an impulsive, playful, and ephemeral action, oriented towards immediate pleasure or social interaction. In contrast, danza derives from Old French danse (from Germanic dintjan, «movement from side to side»), acquiring connotations of order and symbolic purpose that transcend the recreational.

Historically, this bifurcation manifests since antiquity. In prehistory and ancient Egypt, ritual movements prefigure dance as communication with the transcendent. In classical Greece, dance is consecrated to the muse Terpsichore, distinguishing between popular forms of baile and theatrical or ritual danza that challenged ethical concepts. During the Middle Ages, the Church marginalized both, but danza resurfaced in courtly and ecclesiastical contexts (such as the Danse Macabre), while baile remained in profane spheres. In the Renaissance and Baroque, the distinction consolidates with the codification of ballet in the French court, emphasizing technique and symbolic narrative, as opposed to social baile as mere entertainment. In the 20th century, theorists like Rudolf Laban and Laurence Louppe deepen this separation, conceptualizing danza as a structured kinetic language that generates meaning, differentiating it from improvised baile lacking critical intentionality. In short, baile is an accessible and cathartic expressive operation; danza is an artistic institution that, from its ritual origins, employs the body to expand the rational world, demanding technical discipline and dialectical intentionality.

[The Case of Danza: Its Nature and Value]

Starting from this distinction, we can address the specific case of danza and understand why its reduction to mere therapeutic baile exemplifies the most acute ruin of art as an institution, by stripping it of its capacity to challenge the material body in its rational and social dimension. The worst part is that, furthermore, this practice has a specific name: dance therapy, involving a serious confusion of terms.

Danza, in its institutional dimension as art, operates primarily with corporeal material. The body is not just a medium, but eloquent material that challenges concepts such as identity, power, and the intersection between the individual and the collective, through movements that embody and challenge perceptive and conceptual limitations. From a materialist perspective, danza emerges as a practice that closes a specific operational field: that of intentional kinesis. The choreographer or performer constructs a non-verbal language that forces the receiver to rearticulate their definitions of space, time, and agency, through the direct manipulation of corporeality as a living and relational substance. This positions it as a dialectical art, capable of thematizing the tension between rational control and sensible impulse, questioning dualisms and proposing a material integration where movement generates new knowledge by exposing contradictions of social and ontological reality. In no case is danza reducible to mere affective expression. In choreographies that demand technical and conceptual precision, the body makes connections that expand the operational world of the spectator, forcing them to identify flaws in pre-existing concepts of autonomy and dependence. Danza reveals the body as a vibrant entity entangled with the environment, where movements emerge from intra-material interactions that question the illusion of an autonomous subject, proposing confederations of agency between bodies, spaces, and objects. This interrogative capacity is exemplified in practices that incorporate non-human elements to generate a kinetic discourse that challenges material reality in its totality, extending to the ecological and political.

This operation with the body fosters an elevated awareness of corporeality that transcends sensory perception towards intentional agency. Studies show that dancers exhibit higher levels of body awareness (4.5 out of 5) compared to athletes (3.8) and control groups (3.2), amplifying kinesthetic attention. Techniques like Gaga elevate schematic aspects of the body to explicit attention, dismantling automatic routines and expanding the communicative capacities of the body. Beyond the individual, danza cultivates social and communicative skills. In programs like Dance Well, participants with Parkinson’s regain agency through imaginative tasks that promote mutual care. Quantitative research reveals that dance experience elevates social competencies (scores of 75 in social interaction post-intervention versus 70 in controls), improving non-verbal communication and the perception of others, configuring a functional order that integrates the body into networks of social meaning without reducing it to catharsis. This complexity is evidenced by the fact that 80% of dancers associate dance with a strong social impulse for connection.

[Corporeality and Neurobiological Basis]

Dance profoundly impacts the consciousness of corporeality and its communicative possibilities by activating neurobiological mechanisms that integrate perception, action, and social cognition. From a materialist gnoseological perspective, the body is the primary site where new knowledge about the self and the other is generated, through the amplification of proprioception and kinesthesia. Professional dancers exhibit superior proprioception in lower limb joints, with smaller positioning errors, reflecting refined sensorimotor integration. This heightened awareness emerges from repeated practice, training receptors to send more precise signals to the central nervous system. Dance disciplines the body by imposing a rigorous order that demands precise functional hierarchies, configuring representations of complex social structures. fMRI research reveals that observing and executing dance movements activates the mirror neuron system, generating an embodied simulation that facilitates intentional understanding and enhances kinesthetic empathy. Expert dancers show greater activation in this system when observing sequences from their style, indicating that experience modulates resonance and strengthens the body’s communicative capacity. Furthermore, dance promotes neuroplasticity: six-month interventions in older adults increase resting-state connectivity between brain networks, correlating with improvements in attention and executive functions, and in populations with Parkinson’s, changes in cortical thickness and white matter are observed.

[Neuroplasticity and BDNF]

Neuroplasticity manifests itself particularly expressively in dance, which operates as an embodied intellective operation integrating cognitive, motor, and social demands, generating changes that transcend the effects of simple exercise. Systematic reviews show that dance induces positive brain plasticity in mature brains: increased hippocampal volume, increased grey matter in regions such as the left precentral gyrus, and improved white matter integrity. These changes emerge even in non-professional older adults, where dance surpasses conventional physical activities in inducing volumetric increases in areas such as the cingulate cortex, insula, and corpus callosum, correlated with improvements in spatial memory and executive functions. This superiority lies in its multimodal nature: it combines sequential motor learning, rhythmic coordination, decision-making, and social elements that recruit corticostriatal, cerebellar, and prefrontal circuits, elevating neurotrophic factors like BDNF. In pathological contexts such as Parkinson’s, dance generates plastic changes that improve connectivity between the basal ganglia and premotor cortex, counteracting degeneration.

Specific studies confirm that dance induces significant elevations in peripheral BDNF levels, a key mediator of neuroplasticity. A trial with older adults compared dance with sport training, finding a significant increase in BDNF only in the dance group ($p < 0.004$), suggesting that the cognitive and social complexity of dance amplifies its release. Another systematic review confirmed that dance interventions induce structural changes alongside BDNF elevations that promote plasticity, surpassing monotonous activities. Longitudinal studies reported increases in serum BDNF only in dancers, correlated with larger hippocampal volumes. In pediatric populations with obesity, 12 weeks of dance significantly elevated BDNF ($p = 0.005$) and improved executive functions. In Parkinson’s, dance was associated with BDNF increases and larger volumes in the left precentral gyrus. A comparative study with martial arts found BDNF increases in both groups, but cognitive improvements in attention and flexibility only in dancers, evidencing that the communicative eloquence of dance amplifies BDNF to restructure concepts of autonomy and collective connection. Finally, a systematic review confirmed that dance induces increases in plasma BDNF superior to repetitive exercises, mediating plasticity in the hippocampus and cingulate cortex.

[Reductionism and Commodification of Dance]

Despite this complexity and richness, we face the mercantile reduction being imposed on dance. This equates to a dismantling of its intellective operations—detailed observation, pattern identification, conceptualization of new forms—replacing them with processes that validate any expressive gesture as therapeutic, without demanding the dialectical eloquence that defines art. Although structured dance surpasses other physical activities in improving motivation and aspects of memory, its therapeutic focus trivializes it by equating it with recreational dances that reduce complex choreographies to well-being routines. Quality is eroded by replacing artistic innovations with sequences accessible for emotional healing. This tendency, aggravated by interventions in educational and clinical settings that use dance to regulate stress or promote mindfulness, destroys serious critique by validating any expressive movement as «therapeutic.» Thus, a large part of the population sees dance not as a questioning of the corporeal world, but as an affective escape.

This instrumental view of the body not only impoverishes technical demand but also dissolves the critical institution, replacing rigorous analysis with subjective assessments of well-being, confining dance to a sphere of harmless self-exploration. The inherent commodification aggravates the problem by inserting dance into a market that packages it as a product for stress management. This drift is disastrous due to its alignment with neoliberal regimes that foster hyper-subjectivity, where the dancer becomes an entrepreneur of their own well-being, ignoring the collective and political dimensions of movement. Historical choreographies, rooted in cultural resistances, are reduced to recreational sequences sold in apps, eroding formal innovation and conceptual depth. This commodification ruins levels of quality by democratizing access without discriminating criteria, validating the superficial as equivalent to the profound. It thus contributes to a subtle form of social control, where dance, stripped of its critical eloquence, channels dissident energies towards individual complacency, reinforcing power structures by preventing the collective body from questioning norms through movements that expose their arbitrariness.

Ultimately, this contamination by therapeutic and commercial approaches undermines the material essence of dance as an art that questions reality, confining it to a palliative role that ignores its potential to reconfigure the world. A perpetual rational immaturity is promoted where the population prioritizes affective release over confronting conceptual limits, impoverishing the artistic field and limiting the expansion of human knowledge in its corporeal and social dimension. Herein lies the paradox: the most significant therapeutic results are found among those who practice the art of dance, not among those who simply express themselves, have catharsis, or consume healing packages through baile.