Anna Halprin. Dance to Heal. Healing trauma with the power of movement

Watch more films about the US: Anna was stricken by cancer about 55 years ago. She knew in early times dance was used as a healing and decided to dance to heal herself. She is now 96 years old. Anna says that being medically cured and truly healed is not the same thing. To be completely healed of a disease, you must go through some other kind of process. To dance through sickness, one must first embrace it. Then, by working through the psychological knots and wounds it has created, negative emotions can be released. Anna began to use dance to help young men afflicted with AIDS during the height of the epidemic in United States. By ‘dancing their disease’ together, they could freely express their fear, anger, and frustration, as well as their love for each other. She says that this tribal sense of community and strength gave AIDS victims a sense of belonging and peace, which is a kind of healing. Anna also used dan