Diversity Issues in Movement Observation and Assessment

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American Journal of Dance TherapyPublication of the American DanceTherapy Association ISSN 0146-3721 Am J Dance TherDOI 10.1007/s10465-013-9159-9

Diversity Issues in Movement Observationand Assessment

Christine Caldwell

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Diversity Issues in Movement Observationand Assessment

Christine Caldwell

� American Dance Therapy Association 2013

Abstract Dance/movement therapy (DMT), like any psychotherapy, must operate

in ways that embrace and articulate diversity issues, making sure that power,

privilege, and difference are navigated skillfully on nonverbal as well as verbal

levels. This includes issues that arise in movement observation and assessment. This

article, by reviewing and extending existing literature in DMT and other fields,

attempts to suggest ways in which movement assessment may unconsciously enact

bias by subtly pathologizing how the ‘‘different’’ body moves and acts. This article

also suggests ways dance/movement therapists can contribute to social justice

pedagogy as it pertains to the moving body and to actively work for social justice

for those with bodies different from sociocultural norms.

Keywords Dance therapy � Nonverbal communication � Movement observation �Movement assessment � Diversity � Social justice

Introduction

People move and belong to movement communities just as they speak and belong to

speech communities. This idea was embraced and articulated by early observers of

movement such as Hall (1969, 1981), Birdwhistle (1970), and Bateson (1980), all of

whom observed that categories such as culture, gender, and socioeconomic status

profoundly affect movement behavior. When dance/movement therapists began the

important search for universally usable movement assessment systems, this idea

This is a revised work of a paper originally published in S. Bender (Ed.). Bewegungsanalyse von

Interaktionen: Movement Analysis of Interaction (Caldwell, 2010) (Excerpted here with kind permission

from Logos Verlag Berlin).

C. Caldwell (&)

Somatic Counseling Psychology Program, Naropa University, Boulder, CO, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

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DOI 10.1007/s10465-013-9159-9

Author's personal copy

may have been pushed into the background. As academics and clinicians now strive

to work in culturally and socially competent inclusive ways with clients who

embody differences such as race, ethnicity, gender identity, class, ability, age, and

sexual identity, dance/movement therapists have an opportunity to critically

examine assumptions and potential unconscious biases that may occur when

clinicians observe others’ bodies standing, sitting, gesturing, or moving.

Potential pitfalls in movement observation strategies that do not take diversity

issues into account may take the form of dance/movement therapists unconsciously

labeling movement behaviors as dysfunctional, restricted, or problematic because

the observed person moves as a member of an oppressed social category, and dance/

movement therapists are unconsciously uncomfortable with that category, or with

their differences from it. In this sense, DMT may want to extend its understanding

of somatic countertransference, defined by Ross (2000), as the ‘‘physical as well as

emotional responses aroused in the therapist’’ (p. 453) in reaction to the client, to

include issues of unexamined privilege, internalized body shame, and unresolved or

unconscious bias. It may also occur that dance/movement therapists may not take

into account that the act of clients being observed by members of a dominant culture

or social category (therapists) can result in members of marginalized categories

adapting their postures, gestures, tension flow, shape flow, and eye contact in ways

that are more relevant to power and privilege dynamics than personality constructs

(Henley, 1977). Though it has been amply demonstrated that movement is related to

personality and pathology (Cruz, 2009; Davis, 1970; Lausberg, 1998; North, 1975),

if diagnosticians think and observe only through the lens of personality and

pathology, they may fail to consider the variables of power, privilege, and

difference, variables that can be central to clients’ experiences and to success in

therapy.

Dance/movement therapy has traditionally relied heavily on movement obser-

vation as a central assessment and research tool. This has created a dynamic in

which a dance/movement therapist, statistically likely to be female, heterosexual,

physically able, and middle class, is trained and then expected to: (1) observe

transient and complex actions in an unbiased and detailed manner, (2) remember or

notate them accurately, and (3) come up with an appropriate interpretation or

assessment of the observed movement behaviors in a way that informs effective

treatment.

The likelihood, especially in agency environments, that a client will be

‘‘different’’ from the dance/movement therapist in some or all of these social

categories, is significant. While video has assisted the dance/movement therapist’s

observation and notation skills, it cannot be used in on-the-spot clinical situations.

Also, video will never be able to do the job of interpretation. Research that

examined both video and live movement observation skills has surfaced problems

with inter-rater reliability of movement assessment in some cases (Dayanim,

Goodill, & Lewis, 2006), and limitations in what behavior can be interpreted in

others (Davis & Markus, 2006).

The very process of one person being an outside observer of another, and that

observer having the power and status to comment on the health and pathology of the

other, can be fraught with peril. In diversity studies this process is named as a power

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differential. Skill building that helps a therapist competently navigate power

differentials may take just as long or longer than movement observation training

(Johnson, 2001; Roysircar, Singh Sandhu, & Bibbons, 2003). Even when dance/

movement therapists have received and absorbed extensive diversity training, the

observed clients may have such a longstanding history of being oppressed by

members of dominant cultures that their movement behaviors may still reflect

sensible mistrust of being observed. While many dance/movement therapists assert

that this mistrust can be seen, notated, and accounted for, this assumption may be

overly optimistic (Davis & Markus, 2006).

While dance/movement therapists will always need to observe and assess

movement behavior, social justice theory, feminist theory, and critical race theory

have advocated for a more phenomenological approach to inquiry (McTaggart,

1997; Shildrick & Price, 1999). In particular, an inquiry that addresses power

differentials by asking verbally capable clients to speak about or move their own

‘‘lived experience’’ of their bodies (Boas, 2006; Johnson, 2009), treating the clients’

statements as valid information, is a source of authoritative knowledge that is on par

with information generated by external observation. Opposite viewpoints may aptly

point out that a phenomenological approach misses some information as well; that

any method of inquiry is limited. Therefore, new models for adaptive assessment

strategies may be needed. Within the phenomenological scenario, however,

observation, assessment, and diagnosis can be co-constructed by therapist and

client, researcher and participant, in a way that blends a right to autonomy and

justice, with accrued knowledge in the field of dance/movement therapy.

Diversity in Movement Behavior

Theories in dance/movement therapy have creatively struggled with the issue of

either the universality or the particularity of movement meaning. While acknowl-

edging cultural differences in movement style, movement analysis literature tends to

commit to the idea that movement assessment forms are only describing what is

there, in terms that are culturally neutral and universally applicable (Duh, 2008;

Kestenberg Amighi, 1990; Kestenberg Amighi, Loman, Lewis, & Sossin, 1999;

Koch, Cruz, & Goodill, 2001). This premise also holds that because of the basic

human universality of movement, movement empathy becomes a valid means for a

therapist or observer to ‘pick up’ movement meaning from others (Koch et al., 2001;

Loman & Merman, 1996). Kestenberg Amighi (1990), for instance, notes that KMP

has:

…more than 60 categories of movement brought together into nine

diagrams… Since these categories of movement are not culturally recognized

categories, but rather unconsciously patterned ways of moving, they are not

readily subjected to observer effect, or observer bias, nor are they particularly

context-dependent. (p. 119)

LaBarre (2001) notes that this sense of universality in movement behavior

exemplifies what is called an ‘‘intrinsic meaning’’ position which ‘‘holds that the

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ability to understand others’ nonverbal expression is innate and based on a body

language substrate common to humankind’’ (p. 100). The facial coding and emotion

researcher Paul Ekman (Ekman & Ellsworth, 1972) would also be a member of this

school of thought.

LaBarre also states that this sense of movement meaning being intrinsic is only

one of three paradigms an observer can work from, the other two being a cultural

school and the school of practical analysis. The cultural position posits that ‘‘body

language, like spoken language, is arbitrarily determined and simply learned and

that it is an egregious error to attempt to understand nonverbal behavior through

empathy as it would be to attempt to understand the concept of spoken language

through empathy’’ (2001, pp. 100–101). In postmodern philosophical and socio-

logical thought, a number of writers assert that the body itself is socially

constructed, noting that dominant culture gets to do the constructing, often as a way

to marginalize those who deviate from the norm (Butler, 1999; Irigaray, 1999).

The practical analysis position does not attend to a nonverbal behavior ‘‘sign’’ or

symbolic function, but simply classifies how movements are performed, concerning

itself with ‘‘a person’s adaptive style with things and with other people as

physically, not only psychologically, experienced objects’’ (LaBarre, 2001, p. 142).

The changing context in which any movement occurs is crucial to its ultimate

meaning. Rudolph Laban typifies the practical analysis position, and his work was

refined and extended by Kestenberg (1995), Kestenberg Amighi (1990), Bartenieff

(1980) and Davis (1970), who all found that Laban’s analysis system, based in

simply describing movement behavior, surfaced a correlation between certain

movement parameters and psychopathologies.

LaBarre (2001), herself a psychoanalyst, carefully assembles evidence for and

against each of the three views of movement behavior, and ultimately recommends

that clinicians move back and forth between them, as each holds wisdom and

limitations. In this way, her work points out that dance/movement therapists can

surface what conceptual lens they are looking through as they assess their clients,

and take the courageous step to take off and put on a different lens on a moment-to-

moment basis. Thus, dance/movement therapists can avoid the therapeutic hubris of

assuming that the lens is a clear reflection of reality and remain open to other ways

of knowing, in particular, to the client’s way of knowing.

Dance/movement therapy literature has attempted to articulate clinical practice

that works in culturally competent ways (Chang, 2009; Dosamantes-Beaudry, 1997;

Duh, 2008; Hanna, 1990; Kestenberg Amighi, 1990; Lewis, 1997; Pallaro, 1997).

Dokter (2007), for instance, found that the more therapists were from a culturally

isolated and homogenous upbringing, the more they experienced cultural dissonance

with their clients. Boas (2006), using participatory action research (PAR), has

developed what she calls the Transcultural Competence Project. As a result of this

study, she advocates that DMT build an understanding of cultural agency; that it

examine professional DMT practice across cultures, and that DMT develop

movement-based cultural dimensions concepts so that it can integrate anthropolog-

ical studies of the body with existing movement analysis tools, and as a result refine

the interpretation of movement in DMT. She states:

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Since the ground-breaking work of anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson,

Margaret Mead and Edward T. Hall… proxemic studies have highlighted

differences in how people of varying cultures experience and manage

movement and interpersonal space (Bateson, 1980; Hall, 1981).

One could build on this rich literature by conducting a meta-analysis of

ethnographic studies of movement in specific cultural contexts, together with

the more universalistic movement analysis and cultural dimensions literatures.

This would be a basis for identifying patterns and distinctions in cultural

movement and exploring their possible significance in relation to notions of

power, purpose and other social constructs. The resulting movement-based

cultural dimensions model could be used in theoretical and practical training

of therapists working in multicultural settings. In developing such a model, we

need to protect the tension between universalistic and particularistic perspec-

tives. (p. 126)

Another important contributor to cultural competence in DMT is Patrizia Pallaro

(1997), who points out that culture is overlooked in psychotherapy even though it is

persistent and inevitable. She encourages therapists to become familiar with the

nonverbal expressive modes of a client’s culture ‘‘in order to avoid culturally-biased

stereotyping and ethnocentrism, as well as to fully understand the client’s

dynamics’’ (p. 227). Pallaro is particularly interested in how people immigrating

into another culture need to adapt to that culture, and that this can confuse how a

therapist views a client as psychologically adjusted or maladjusted. For instance:

Individualistic characteristics of the self in the Western perspective are in

significant opposition to the more socialized aspects of the self as conceived in

the Eastern world… Because of the American emphasis on self-reliance and

independence, therapists in the U.S. often interpret relationships between

children and mothers from Asian cultures as symbiotic and over dependent.

Needless to say, this oversimplification does not account for values deeply

ingrained in Asian cultures. (pp. 228–229)

Kestenberg Amighi (1990) described errors in the assumptions of current

developmental psychologists that assert maternal-infant eye contact as central to

healthy infant attachment, by providing evidence that many cultures de-emphasize

eye contact and instead navigate attachment by different (more whole body) means.

In a study validating Davis’s psychodynamic inventory, Cruz omitted the inventory

item of eye contact from the research, noting that cross-cultural differences rendered

it suspect as a valid measure (2009). Hanna (1990) has also contributed to DMT’s

discourse on culture and ideas of universality by stating:

Since the body is composed of universal features, most members of the

medical and therapeutic professions erroneously assume that the body is

experienced in a universal manner. Because time, space, and energy are

universals in human life, many professionals mistakenly believe all people

experience them the same way. However, assumptions concerning the psychic

unity of humans ignore the facts of cultural learning. Therapists deal with

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disturbed and/or dysfunctional persons who occupy positions in on-going

sociocultural systems. (p. 118)

Hanna goes on to comment on the value of broadening our concept of culture by

stating:

Cultures, it should be noted, may be based on age, sex, ethnicity, race,

occupational group, and so on. The handicapped, mentally disturbed, and

mentally retarded may sometimes be conceived of as having their own

cultures. Therapists also have a culture. It is conceivable that they might

benefit by occasionally viewing it from an outsider’s perspective (Hanna,

1990, p. 116).

An example of this potential cultural disconnect between the perceptions of

therapist and client has been hinted by Henley (1977), who found that working class

children and children of color have to be nonverbally ‘‘bilingual’’ between their

race/class and the movement vocabulary of the white, middle-class world. This

dovetails with widespread reporting from people of color, as well as people with

different sexual orientations, that when they come into contact with the dominant,

typically white, culture they speak and move differently than when they are back

home amongst their own people (Johnson, 2009). Typically this involves being

more contained on a body level, as well as somatically signaling deference (Hanna,

1990). This nonverbal, as well as verbal, bilingualism is an adaptation to white

middle-class culture for reasons of safety, inclusion, acceptance, and a reduction of

the perception of threat (Thomas, 1998). Dance/movement therapists must assume

that this adaptation is likely to occur in their own therapeutic relationships as well.

An important contributor to the field of diversity and inclusivity in DMT is Meg

Chang (2009), who comments on cultural consciousness in DMT theory, practice,

and training. She noted:

Without first critically examining subtle forms of racial, ethnic, and cultural

bias that exist in DMT education and practice, there is a danger of foreclosing

communication among socioculturally diverse students and educators,

between therapists and clients, and among community participants and

facilitators of community-based healing arts events. (p. 300)

Observing that traditional DMT has been based on western European and North

American concepts of mental health, which stress the nuclear family, autonomy, and

independence, Chang expresses concern that DMT might implicitly privilege clients

who are verbal and self-disclosing, and who initiate spontaneous communication in

psychotherapy. Because these values become normative, she states, they can

influence how dance/movement therapists observe and assess movement. In

Stanton-Jones (1992):

As DMT became part of clinical treatment teams in psychiatric hospitals, the

dominance of the medical model of diagnosis and treatment stimulated the

codification of movement observation methods as counterparts to psycholog-

ical evaluation and diagnosis. (as cited in Chang, 2009, p. 301)

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She goes on to assert, ‘‘subtle ethnocentric monoculturalism (Sue, 2003) rather

than conscious discrimination can bias the interpretation of movement’’ (p. 302). To

integrate these ideas, Chang has coined the term psychophysical habitus (inspired by

the work of Pierre Bourdieu) to describe ‘‘the entire range of unconscious

associations to body movement—beginning with nonverbal movement observation’’

(p. 303). Psychophysical habitus includes aesthetic preferences, and ‘‘is an

embodied and encompassing, unconscious and unavailable to linear thinking, mind

and body prototype that is instilled preverbally’’ (p. 304). Chang is concerned that

dance/movement therapists are influenced by their professional training, habits, and

psychophysical orientation of their culture, when observing movement.

In a related area of culture studies, DMT research has, upon occasion, taken on

issues of sex role behavior and male–female differences (Davis, Weitz, & Culkin,

1980; Kestenberg, 1995). Noting that sex roles are often revealed in nonverbal

communication (NVC), these researchers have found that women tend to adjust

their movements according to the personality features of their male partners. They

also found that women tend to focus more on their partner, and seem to influence

them to exhibit less anxious and more relaxed nonverbal responses. These studies,

when applied to the cultural competency of movement analysts and therapists, can

go a long way towards discussing the possible clinical effects of our being a female-

dominated field.

Though the discipline of DMT carries some tradition in the area of cross-cultural

competence, it has not yet substantively crossed over into critical commentary and

pedagogy on sexual identity, gender identity, ableism, classism, and ageism, as well

as taking on issues such as the somatic abuse of power and privilege via domination,

marginalization, and oppression. This work has been introduced by authors in

philosophy and sociology, articulating the various means where the body itself is

marginalized in society, and in particular how the ‘‘different’’ body, one that is

deemed wrong by means of its color, size, shape, configuration, age, ability,

demeanor, symmetry, posture, movement, gesture, etc., is oppressed by norms

developed by those in power (Burroughs & Ehrenreich, 1993; Cohen & Weiss, 2003;

Conboy, Medina & Stanbury, 1997; Csordas, 1994; Currie & Raoul, 1992; Fausto-

Sterling, 2000; Grosz, 1994; Irigaray, 1999; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999; Leder, 1990;

Nasser, Baistow, & Treasure, 2007; Price & Shildrick, 1999; Weiss, 1999; Riskind &

Gotay, 1982; Spangler, 2002). According to Thomson (1997), ‘‘The body that acts

and appears different becomes a marked pariah and disrupter of the social order’’ (p.

254). The integration of this literature could be of tremendous benefit to dance/

movement therapists, particularly those who want to observe and assess movement in

competent ways, because movement assessment could, if not examined critically,

form a primary delivery system for the somatic abuse of power, via the implicit and

explicit imposition of unquestioned biases about movement onto clients bodies.

Another researcher who takes on this important area of inquiry is Hanna (1990).

She asserts, for instance, that the middle-class worldview unconsciously carried by

many therapists will clash with a lower-class client worldview:

Often, the lower-class individual is capable of insight therapy that involves

creative self-expression but the lower-class client is unwittingly rejected in

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one way or another by the therapist who has different verbal and nonverbal

means of communication. (pp. 121–122)

A strong, non-DMT commentator in the arena of gender identity is Henley

(1977). She notes that many NVC researchers have remarked on gender

identification issues, to the point of talking about NVC that displays ‘‘gender

ambiguity.’’ She admonishes us to ‘‘…look more carefully at the terms we so

casually apply to interaction situations; ‘‘gender ambiguity’’ may instead be

dominance ambiguity. Labeling it as a gender problem tends to settle the issue,

unscientifically direct our attention to the wrong variable, and work politically (and

subtly) to preserve the status quo’’ (p. 140).

Another fertile area of inquiry for DMT may be found in discourse related to the

idea that some differences are more or less invisible to casual or even professional

observation. While categories such as gender, age, and race are often visible to an

observer, class, sexual orientation, ability, and gender identification are potentially

invisible. An area of inquiry DMT might take on would involve finding out more

about the lived, somatic experience of people who can ‘‘pass’’ as a member of a

normative social category if they want to, in contrast to those who cannot. Are there

differences in observed movement behavior as well? Are these people ‘‘bilingual’’

in their movement behavior, depending on whether or not they wish to remain

invisible in their difference? How might this be clinically relevant to dance/

movement therapy?

By expanding dance/movement therapists notions of difference to include other

social categories, such as queer, transgendered, bisexual, and disabled (or

differently-abled), to name a few, the field can contribute a somatic perspective

to the largely academic discourse currently in print about these important groups.

This would involve individual and collective diversity training, as well as

innovations in DMT research.

The Validity and Reliability of Observing and Assessing Movement Behavior

Are there movement patterns that are commonly interpreted in a way that is

invalid? We suspect that there is ‘‘conventional wisdom’’ within dance/

movement therapy and movement analysis that needs to be tested and

corrected. It would also be valuable to understand when a sense of conviction

or confidence in one’s movement interpretations is misleading and detrimental

to good practice. (Davis & Markus, 2006, p. 125)

The quote above brings us to a second line of inquiry of examining best practices

in current movement observation and assessment forms. Davis and Markus (2006)

have commented that in NVC research there are two types of studies, encoding and

decoding. Encoding involves skillfully observing what is out there, as exemplified

by Laban and his disciples. The second type of study, decoding, reveals how people

perceive and interpret observed, nonverbal behavior. Davis and Markus caution that

these two categories need to be kept separate, or a ‘‘decoding’’ error will occur when

they are confounded. An example they offer involves a rater who says that a facial

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movement codes as sadness, but she doesn’t really know if the person is feeling sad.

The person could be pretending, or they could potentially be expressing difference

in a way that the rater does not understand. As dance/movement therapist Robyn

Flaum Cruz attests, ‘‘When assessments are used to document the process or

outcomes of the process for clinical research goals, the meaning of the movement

observed comes into sharp focus. Validity consists of the arguments and data that

support how assessment observations can be interpreted’’ (Cruz, 2009, p. 137).

Extending these ideas of the relationship between observation and assessment,

DMT has come to regard certain movement patterns as more or less healthy. There

is a prevailing assumption, for instance, that the greatest movement repertoire

correlates to the greatest psychological health, that simultaneous core and distal

initiation is healthier, and that coordinated, complex, and coherently interrelated

movement is associated with psychological health (Burn, 1987; Cruz, 2009; Davis,

1970). While these correlations may be robust, how they are operationalized and

enacted clinically in diverse settings becomes crucial. An observation that a client is

carving space or sinking in a certain plane, and a DMT intervention that relates to

that observation, becomes a decoding process that cannot avoid being filtered

through both the dance/movement therapist’s personal history as well as institu-

tionalized biases internalized by the DMT field itself. What emerges on the other

side of that filter could be a distortion and a misattunement to the lived experience

of the person being observed. In addition, if dance/movement therapists are not even

analyzing people who embody differences such as physical handicaps (including

instruments included in their body maps, such as wheelchairs, walkers, and canes),

the validity of assessment tools is diminished. This notion can take us back to the

roots of movement observation. Birdwhistle (1970) stated, ‘‘The most comprehen-

sive knowledge of kinesics can’t permit us to analyze the precise social meaning of

the content of an interactional sequence. On the other hand, we can detect, isolate,

and describe the kinesic behavior’’ (p. 86).

For instance, decoding errors may play out clinically in two possible ways: either

in how dance/movement therapists might interpret the behavior of clients in ways

that inadvertently solidify restricting and marginalizing social categories, or in how

they remain unaware of therapists’ somatic influences on clients, such that clients’

adaptations to their therapists are interpreted as less than healthy. Davis et al. (1980)

stressed that decoding research is important in DMT because it asks what movement

patterns are likely to be misinterpreted on first impression.

Movement may never lie, but sometimes it does not reveal what we think it

may, and at other times what we think it says is our projection. The real

challenge is to know when movement is a true indication or not and whether

we can accurately detect this in the moment. (Davis et al., 1980, p. 109)

Henley (1977), for instance, noting that nonverbal cues play an extremely

important and complex role in the maintenance of social order, finds that in research

settings how an interviewer sits, moves, and gestures influences the movement

behavior of the subject, especially in regards to dominance issues. She also asserts

that nonverbal responsiveness between interviewers and their subjects is inhibited in

the face of cultural/class differences. By centralizing the study of the nonverbal

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influence of the dance/movement in the therapeutic relationship, DMT may begin to

craft a more nuanced understanding of the clinician’s effect on both what behavior

is observed and how it is interpreted in ways that promote social justice.

Boas (2006) recommends conducting evaluations of DMT practices across

cultures. She urges dance/movement therapists to combine self-assessment,

observation and interview methodologies to triangulate user, practitioner, and

third-party perspectives. Chang (2009) offers that:

Rather than having interpretation imposed or meaning assigned by a dance/

movement therapist who is not from a given cultural group, it is important for native

speakers to self-identify as cultural informants. Next, it is crucial to demonstrate

respect for the member’s opinions and suggestions—especially in reference to

assessment and diagnosis—by implementing local knowledge (p. 310).

In this author’s work, called the Moving Cycle, assessment itself is almost

entirely absent and considered almost completely unnecessary (Caldwell, 2002,

2008). The session begins in an observation-rich environment, called the awareness

phase, where the client reports inner somatic experience and the therapist

contributes exteroceptive observations. It may involve a male client noting that

his jaw is tight, and the therapist noting that as he said that he touched his jaw and

sighed. No interpretation of these actions is necessary for the session to proceed.

The next phases simply promote non-interpretive engagement with the movement

sequences that organize as a result of high quality attention to, and trust in, the

client’s somatic experiences.

Towards the end of a moving cycle session, a version of assessment occurs, that

of meaning making. Meaning making is not engaged in at all until the body has

completed a movement sequence experience. In other words, it is only at the end of

an experience that we can make any kind of good sense out of it. Meaning making

that occurs before the body’s buried wisdom is directly and openly accessed and

supported will only reflect clients’ cognitive constructs that mirror the problems

they came in with, plus the cognitive constructs that the therapist imposes. In

research, meaning making arises after data has been collected and analyzed. The

data comes from the participants, not the researcher. At the end of a session,

meaning making is initiated and crafted by the verbally capable client, with only

moments of mentoring by the therapist.

Assessment, then, may not always need to occur as a means of treatment

planning—setting goals with the client that are client-centered can do that, even

with some populations typically considered unable to muster the capacity to set

goals (perhaps they only fail to set goals in ways understandable and acceptable to

the therapist). It may also be unnecessary in many cases to translate observations

into interpretations, so that interventions can be generated. Observations themselves

can be so powerful that the body begins to organize usable movement impulses

simply by virtue of being seen in a descriptive, rather than interpretive, way.

Dance/movement therapy has historically expended a lot of meaningful and

creative effort in developing encoding systems for movement behavior, and

researching them for validity and reliability. By continuing to do so, DMT can

consistently remove errors and bias. By beginning to examine issues such as the

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inherent as well as personal pitfalls in assessment, DMT can go a long way towards

eliminating the decoding errors mentioned by Davis and Markus (2006). This may

also enable us to centralize what anthropologist Brigitte Jordon (1997) calls the

authoritative knowledge of the body.

Inquiry Methodology That Centralizes Equity Issues

Jordon (1997) began her work with an interest in cross-cultural childbirth practices.

By researching what happens as a woman labors and delivers a child, both in United

States hospitals and in home births in developing countries, she became fascinated

by what she called the authoritative knowledge of the body. Where does it reside?

She noted that in any culture, certain people are empowered as authorities—people

that we imbue with knowledge about how the world works—whether they are

doctors, priests, presidents, or shamans. She used labor and delivery as a lens to

discover where any culture may locate its authoritative knowledge about the body.

Her findings, arrived by coding themes from audio transcriptions of hundreds of

birthing rooms, surfaced a cross-cultural difference. In the United States, doctors

and machines tend to know what is happening to a laboring woman’s body, to the

point of ignoring many to all of her subjective reports of her experience as relevant

to the determination of medical procedures and outcomes. In developing country

home births, the tendency is for the laboring woman (who knows her own body) and

the midwife (who knows about laboring bodies in general) to co-create an

authoritative knowledge about what is happening bodily, and therefore what

procedures need to be done or not done. Locating expertise about how the body

works and what it is signaling as coming from outside the body, from people in

power over that body, essentially defines any ism anyone would care to mention.

Though Jordon did not extend her work in this direction, dance/movement

therapists and somatic psychologists may become curious about their therapist/

client relational dynamics, and where authoritative knowledge of the client’s body

resides (Johnson, 2009). One way to begin to unpack this rich question is to turn to

what different research paradigms have to say about how knowledge is constructed.

Positivism is a method of inquiry that assumes that there is a real world out there,

and that we are capable of ascertaining its nature through empirical investigation,

rationally and objectively. Most modern experimental science subscribes to some

version of positivism. Constructivism, a postmodern paradigm, asserts that ideas

about the world are constructed in our minds, and that the constructs of the

investigator can’t be separated from the participant’s constructs. Critical theory, that

houses feminist, queer, disability, and critical race theory, offshoots from

constructivism. These inquiry paradigms attempt to centralize the voices of

marginalized peoples in order to challenge views of the world ‘constructed’ by those

in power and imposed on everyone else.

In research methodology that bases itself in one of these constructivist

paradigms, phenomenological inquiry tends to be chosen as the means of collecting

data, and the data is a reflection of the lived experience of participants. This requires

that the way participants construct their world is foregrounded to the point where

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researchers may be moved and shifted from their own ways of constructing the

world. In addition, the purpose of research itself is re-envisioned—from an activity

that furthers the interests and career of the researcher to a project that must be useful

to the community in which the study occurs. From this commitment to an immediate

application to the here-and-now problems of a community, plus the advancement of

social justice, exciting new forms of research, that harkens back to the roots of

dance and the creative arts, emerge.

Performance ethnography and PAR are two of these forms. When a group or

individual is studied, that person or group become co-researchers in the project, and

the culmination of the research may involve some kind of performance or action

that allows the participants to creatively express lived experience, while at the same

time contributing to social issues (Freire, 2007). While these forms of research are

not meant to replace positivistic approaches, in DMT as well as all social sciences,

these newer forms of research may do more to get at persistent social ills than a

purely positivistic approach. What may become possible in the area of movement

observation and assessment is that these new research forms can be integrated in

such a way as to competently address decoding issues in DMT assessment.

Very few studies of movement behavior or assessment reviewed for this article

mentioned the lived experience of the participant (phenomenological methodology).

Exceptions can be found in the work of Fiasca (1993), Johnson (2009), and Boas

(2006), though none exclusively look at movement observation and assessment.

Again, the field of DMT must turn to feminist and other critical theorists, who tend

to reject universalistic paradigms about the body.

For us, the central point of feminist theories of the body is that they reject that

easy categorization, or any striving for a false unity that belies the sometimes

confusing but always productive tensions of disparate starting points,

perspectives, and aims… The body then has become the site of intense

inquiry not in the hope of recovering an authentic female body unburdened of

patriarchal assumptions, but in the full acknowledgement of the multiple and

fluid possibilities of differential embodiment. (Shildrick & Price, 1999, p. 12)

One means of looking at the ‘‘multiple and fluid possibilities of differential

embodiment’’ is to value the subjective report of sensation as much or more than the

supposedly more objective observation of movement. Marshall (1999) declares that

people have difficulty truly understanding each other’s bodily experiences because

people have trouble naming and describing sensation, making it difficult for others

to truly understand what the sensation feels like for that person. So, theorizing the

body can be tricky and ‘‘should entail reflecting on the language in which people

describe themselves and looking for divisions as a way of getting a better grasp of

totalities’’ (p. 70).

Asserting that the embodied self is created and recreated through interactions,

Marshall states that part of what is happening when we are looking to understand

our sensations is that we look to the experts who have written down and attempted

to describe women’s bodily experiences, an echo of Jordon’s concerns about where

and how authoritative knowledge is constructed. For example, Marshall was looking

to understand labor pains when she was pregnant, and she mentioned that she is still

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unsure as to whether or not she had pain because she was trying to fit her experience

into what others had written about that experience. (Marshall, 1999)

Because of the difficulty in operationally defining inner, subjective experiences,

such as sensation, DMT may have neglected to include it in its inquiry methods in

ways that then inadvertently devalue it for individual authoritative knowledge.

While toxic for any body, this neglect may be particularly crippling for people

already ignored and marginalized for embodying difference (Gordon, 1997). By

trying to find ‘‘the truth’’ about any body, DMT may solidify a somatically abusive

status quo, as explained by philosopher Luce Irigaray (1999):

Truth is necessary for those who are so distanced from their body that they

have forgotten it. But their ‘truth’ immobilizes us, turns us into statues, if we

can’t loose its hold on us. If we can’t defuse its power by trying to say, right

here and now, how we are moved. (p. 88)

Gatens (1999) believes that bodies are overlaid and shaped by culture and are

essentially imagined:

This conception of the imaginary body may provide the framework in which

we can give an account of how power, domination and sexual difference

intersect in the lived experience of men and women. Gender itself may be

understood on this model not as the effect of ideology or cultural values but as

the way in which power takes hold of and constructs bodies in particular ways.

(Gatens, 1999, p. 230)

The previous two quotes hint that our concepts of what bodies are and how they

move may be located in the largely unconscious power dynamics of the mental

health clinician.

Butler (1993, 1999) has challenged society to ask itself what constitutes a body

that is worth protecting, a body that matters (is literally material), and a body that is

considered worth living. She sees people who define bodily norms (such as dance/

movement therapists) as ‘inside’—inside a group that holds the power to define who

is ‘outside,’ and therefore marginalized. She questions how one can live in a

marginalized body, because:

The limits of constructivism are exposed at those boundaries of bodily life

where objected or delegitimated bodies fail to count as ‘bodies’… Hence, it

will be as important to think about how and to what end bodies are constructed

and, further, to ask after how bodies which fail to materialize provide the

necessary ‘outside’, if not the necessary support, for the bodies which, in

materializing the norm, qualify as bodies that matter. (1999, p. 243)

Disability theory can also challenge DMT to reexamine its assumptions about the

normative body. Davis (1997) notes:

Society splits the body into good and bad parts-good hair, eyes, breasts-bad

armpits, excretory organs, teeth, etc. The tendency is to also split bodies into

categories of functional bodies and dysfunctional bodies, ‘‘normal’’ bodies and

disabled bodies. (p. 58)

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Eli Clare (2001), a queer and disability theorist, may help us begin to articulate

how DMT can understand somatically centered social justice issues. He asserts:

Locating the problems of social injustice in the world, rather than in our

bodies, has been key to naming oppression. It has been powerful for

marginalized peoples, including disabled people, to say, ‘‘Leave our bodies

alone. Stop justifying and explaining your oppressive crap by measuring,

comparing, judging, blaming, creating theories about our bodies.’’ But at the

same time, we must not forget that our bodies are still part of the equation, that

paired with the external forces of oppression are the incredibly internal, body-

centered experiences of who we are and how we live with oppression. To write

about the body means paying attention to these experiences. (pp. 360–361)

Dance/movement therapy may be in a unique position to research and to write

about peoples lived experiences of their bodies, and of the oppression they

experience by virtue of being differently embodied. It can empower them with more

authoritative understanding of their movement behavior and patterns. It can assist

people to loosen the bonds of restrictive and oppressive social categorization of their

embodied experience. Weiss has commented, ‘‘bodies are marked by assumptions

made about their gender, their race, their ethnicity, their class, and their ‘‘natural’’

abilities. These assumptions, moreover, often tend to go unnoticed until they are

violated by a body that refuses to behave as it should’’ (Weiss, 1999, p. 2). Perhaps

DMT can assist the marginalized people it serves to refuse to ‘‘behave as they

should.’’

Where does DMT begin? Some simple and not so simple tasks emerge. Dance/

movement therapy can, when it engages in research, state the social categories of

the participants it studies, and analyze the data it collects in ways that include

variables of difference. It can seek out people who embody difference as

participants in research as well as co-researchers, devoting energy to nuancing

movement observation tools and treatment forms so that encoding processes value

and include their differences. It can empower higher functioning clients to assess

their own movement, particularly the movement that emerges as a result of high-

quality subjective inquiry and engagement free of normative assumptions. It can

develop culturally congruent and culturally inclusive (Chang, 2009) models of

dance/movement therapy. It can employ more phenomenological and social justice-

based research methodologies, such as the qualitative interview, PAR, performance

ethnography, and community-based research. It can use conferences to increase

professional development via diversity training and training in innovative research

methods. It can rededicate itself to the social conscience and activism demonstrated

by many of its pioneers, and make it relevant to the 21st century.

Conclusion

This article has focused on articulating three main themes. First, that people move in

ways that express not only their personality and relative health but also their culture,

race, gender identity, sexual orientation, class, ability, and power dynamics with an

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observer. Second, that movement observation and assessment tools, as well as the

practitioners who use them, must constantly and vigilantly self reflect (and accept

reflection from others) for potential bias in these areas. This includes training

programs, research, and clinical applications. Third, other DMT methods of

observation and assessment that validate and include a client/participant’s inner,

lived experiences need to be developed and used alongside standard movement

observation and assessment tools.

Dance/movement therapists are on the forefront of developing and contributing a

critical pedagogy concerning the various ways dominant cultures can exclude or

marginalize the bodies of people who embody difference, both in visible and

invisible ways. Dance/movement therapy holds a special view on how this abuse of

power can be enacted in a therapeutic milieu rich with NVC. Dance/movement

therapy can help itself, as well as other disciplines, to use culturally and socially

competent assessment and observation methods. In addition, phenomenological

inquiry can be used to help validate each individual’s experience of their body as

being theirs, as being a powerful source of embodied, authoritative knowledge, as

being equal to others’ bodies even though their body is different, and as having

autonomy and human rights. Finally, DMT can offer a means to minimize bias in

observing and analyzing nonverbal behavior, and step further into the arena of using

DMT to engage with and promote social justice.

Acknowledgments A portion of the research involved in the writing of this article was funded by

faculty development funds granted by Naropa University to the author.

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Author Biography

Christine CaldwellPh.D., BC-DMT, LPC, NCC, ACS, is the founder and former director of the Somatic Counseling

Psychology Program at Naropa University, where she teaches somatic counseling, clinical neuroscience,

research, and diversity issues. Her work, called the Moving Cycle, spotlights natural play, early physical

imprinting, fully sequenced movement processes, the opportunities in addiction, and a trust in the

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authoritative knowledge of the body. She has taught at the University of Maryland, George Washington,

Concordia, Seoul Women’s University, Southwestern College, and Santa Barbara Graduate Institute, and

trains, teaches and lectures internationally. She has published over 30 articles and chapters, and her books

include Getting Our Bodies Back, and Getting In Touch.

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Diversity Issues in Movement Observation and Assessment

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