Movement and Music in Therapy

Dr Jacques Launay is an interdisciplinary researcher, who has worked across fields of anthropology, psychology and neuroscience. His research focuses on the ways that music can help people to form social bonds, the impact this can have on health and wellbeing, and the evolutionary origins of music.

Synchronisation and social bonding: How external rhythms harmonise groups
In this talk I will discuss the ways in which people coordinate through sharing external bodily rhythms. There is a natural tendency for objects to synchronise with one another, and when humans do this they perceive a sense of connection with one another. Experimental work has demonstrated that features of group music making, such as coordination, exertion, and sharing attention, might all play some part in the social bonding effects of music.

Manos Tsakiris studied psychology (BSc, Athens, Greece),  philosophy (MSc in Philosophy of Mental Disorder, KCL, UK), and cognitive neuropsychology (MSc, UCL, UK) before completing his PhD (2006) in psychology and cognitive neurosciences at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL. In 2007, he joined the Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is currently Professor of Psychology and is leading the Lab of Action & Body (LAB). His research is highly interdisciplinary and uses a wide range of methods to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms that shape the experience of embodiment and self-identity. He is the recipient of the Young Mind and Brain Prize in 2014, of the 22nd Experimental Psychology Society Prize in 2015, and the NOMIS Foundation Distinguished Scientist Award in 2016. Since 2016, he is leading the interdisciplinary Body & Image in Arts & Science (BIAS) project at the Warburg Institute, and since 2017 the INtheSELF ERC Consolidator project at Royal Holloway that investigates the role of interoception for self- and social-awareness.

Interoception: Rhythms of the body and emotion
In my talk I will introduce the concept of interoception that denotes the processing and perception of internal bodily states to present its centrality in the experience of the self but also in aesthetic experiences. The rhythms of our own bodies and their perception may play an important role in understanding the physiological engagement afforded by aesthetic experiences.

Colwyn Trevarthen, Professor (Emeritus) of Child Psychology and Psychobiology at the University of Edinburgh, is a biologist and brain scientist. He began infancy research in 1966 at Harvard with Jerome Bruner and Dr. Berry Brazelton, and studies motives and affections that lead a child to learn with friends of all ages. He reviews research to help parents, teachers and therapists respond with kind companionship to a distressed child who feels alone and unsafe, and makes recordings to study how expressions of ‘musicality’ in movement inspires this communication for development and learning.

Movement and musicality in development of meaning and value
With Stephen Malloch, I use musical acoustics to analyze how a young infant’s expressions animate proto-conversations with an affectionate and attentive adult or child to share fun in imaginative play. Rhythmic dancing of all parts of the body with melodic vocalizations of feeling in song share pride and shame, synchronized to transmit joyful or sad feelings that can make lasting relationships, or cause their loss. Story-telling with ‘communicative musicality’ inspires cultural learning, giving actions and objects meaning and value in lifetime experiences that may be treasured for the future, or shared with ancestors.

Ian Cross is based in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, where he is Faculty Chair. He is Professor and Director of the Centre for Music and Science, where his group explores music, its materials and its effects from a wide range of scientific perspectives. His early work helped set the agenda for the study of music cognition; he has since published widely in the field of music and science, from the psychoacoustics of violins to the evolutionary roots of musicality. His current research explores whether music and speech are underpinned by common interactive mechanisms, and is assessing the effects of children's engagement in group musical activities on the development of their capacity for empathic social interaction. He is Editor-in-Chief of SAGE's new Open Access journal Music & Science, is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge and is also a classical guitarist.

Music as communication
Recent research in my centre indicates strongly that shared processes can underpin interaction in music and in speech. These processes seem best interpreted not as proper to speech or to music, but as characteristic of particular types of interaction: affiliative, empathic, phatic, and reciprocal, whether manifested in conversation or in musical interaction. The frameworks within these types of interaction are most evident can be described as relational, being concerned with setting up and maintaining communicative fluency in interaction. Our results suggest that speech and music can be fruitfully reconceptualised as overlapping subsets of the repertoire of human communicative behaviours.

Professor Helen Odell-Miller OBE is Professor of Music Therapy and Director of the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research. Helen has been a keynote speaker at several national and international conferences in Europe, Australia, Asia and the USA. She is co-editor and an author for the books Supervision of Music Therapy (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2009) and Forensic Music Therapy (Routledge, 2013) and Collaboration and assistance in music therapy (2017). She has published widely in national and international peer-reviewed journals and authored many book chapters. A founder of the European Music Therapy Council, and of the music therapy service in adult mental health in
Cambridge, she serves on several boards including for The Music Therapy Charity, The International Consortium for Research in the Arts Therapies (ICRA), and is currently Principal Investigator for Homeside, a large multi-site, multi country trial investigating music and reading for family care givers at home and those whom they are caring for living with dementia.

Music therapy clinical practice and research: adapting approaches according to need and diagnosis
Music’s capacity to enhance communication and resilience where words and cognition are reclining, is well known. For example, for people living with dementia, agitation can be calmed, and relationships with loved ones can be improved, through musical interactions, facilitated by a music therapist. Memory recall and working within the moment, adapting improvised music to mood, are possible through the direct musical therapeutic relationship. For other populations with mental health diagnoses such as bi polar disorder and personality disorder, music therapy may focus more upon moving between talking and music making in addition to drawing upon a psychosocial and psychoanalytically informed approach in groups, in community settings and in individual therapy. Musical examples including song writing, group and individual improvisations, consented from participant; and recent research findings will illustrate the paper.

Vicky is a Professor of Arts and Wellbeing at Edge Hill University, holding a split post between the Department of Applied Health and Social and Care and the Department of Performing Arts. A dance movement psychotherapist, a clinician, supervisor, educator and researcher, Vicky’s research work remains diverse ranging from artistic enquiry to systematic reviews and meta-analyses. She is currently involved in the ERA study, the largest arts therapies randomised controlled trial in the UK funded by the NIHR. She has also received funding from the clinical commissioning group of Liverpool and the European Union for studies on depression and cancer care. She travels extensively for research and teaching purposes offering key notes, experiential workshops and consultancy work around the world. She is widely published in peer reviewed journals and edited books in the field and is co-editing the international journal Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy published by Taylor and Francis.

Research in dance movement psychotherapy
Research in dance movement psychotherapy is fairly new area. Still, there is an active involvement of dance movement psychotherapists in researching their own practice as well as an interest from other professionals in the embodied and relational components of this discipline. Studies focus on both process and outcomes and methodological approaches vary from case studies to randomised controlled trials and systematic reviews. In this presentation we will look at examples of research with different methodological approaches and see the range of research possibilities available in the field.

Gill Westland is Director of Cambridge Body Psychotherapy Centre and a UKCP registered body psychotherapist, trainer, supervisor, consultant and writer.  She is a full member of the European Association for Body Psychotherapy. She is a co-editor of the journal Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy and an Associate Lecturer on the M.A. Body Psychotherapy programme at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.  She is the author of Verbal and Non-Verbal Communication in Psychotherapy (2015) and various articles and book chapters. Most recently she has researched significant moments of change in body psychotherapy (2018).

Rhythms of relating in body psychotherapy
Interactions with others are rhythmic and involve bodily communications in posture, gesture, speech patterns, facial expressions and autonomic nervous system changes (e.g. in breathing and heart beat).  Signature patterns of relating are formed in early babyhood and prior to birth in relationships with caregivers.  Where early relationships are neglectful, oppressive or abusive the rhythms of relating will be disrupted.  A composite adult client with a traumatic childhood will illustrate the change process in one to one body psychotherapy.  The emphasis is on changes in movement patterns and how these led to more fluid and flexible interactions with others.

Professor Helen Payne, PhD, works at the University of Hertfordshire and is a registered psychotherapist (UKCP) and dance movement psychotherapist (ADMP UK). She trained in the 1990s in the discipline of authentic movement (AM) and employs an integrative psychotherapeutic model in which she trains arts therapists and psychotherapists. She has been active leading research and practice with people with medically unexplained symptoms for over 20 years significantly contributing to the field nationally and internationally with the design of The BodyMind Approach (incorporating AM) to support self-management in the NHS. Recent publications include The BodyMind Approach for patients with medically unexplained symptoms to learn to self-manage, by Helen Payne and Susan Brooks, Frontiers in Psychology, 2018;9, and is also an editor for the recently published Routledge International Handbook of Embodied Perspectives in Psychotherapy: Approaches from Dance Movement and Body Psychotherapies, 2019.

Stefan Priebe graduated in Psychology and Medicine, and qualified as Neurologist, Psychiatrist and Psychotherapist in Germany. Since 1997 he has been Professor for Social and Community Psychiatry at Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL). He is also Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Mental Health Service Development and of the NIHR Global Health Research Group for Developing Psycho-Social Interventions. He heads a research group in East London which runs several programmes focusing on understanding and utilising social interactions to reduce mental distress and with a specific focus on understanding the role of arts and arts therapies.

Alison Hornblower trained as a music therapist at the Nordoff Robbins Centre in London in 2005 and has since worked in both medical and non-medical settings. She has delivered music therapy within settings such as mainstream and special education and is experienced working with people who have a range of difficulties associated with Autism, learning difficulties and dementia. Alison has worked within the NHS, providing music therapy in forensic and secure mental health settings as well as for Local Authorities and Social services. She is currently the Programme Convenor for the Nordoff Robbins Master of Music Therapy training programme across three bases in London, Manchester and Newcastle. She has also presented as keynote and delivered workshops at a number of conferences both nationally and internationally, as well as working alongside other music and health projects. In a previous life, she was also a music and drama teacher within secondary education.

Dr. Elya Steinberg is an Integrative Physician and a Biodynamic Psychotherapist. She studied Bioenergy and elements of Biodynamic Psychotherapy in 1982 and gradated medical school gaining her MD in 1995, both in Israel. She came to London in 1995 to learn from Gerda Boyesen, the founder of Biodynamic psychology and completed a full training course qualifying as a UKCP therapist. She is also practicing various methods of martial arts since 1980 and Shaolin Kung Fu since 2010. She was the Director of the London School of Biodynamic Psychotherapy (LSBP) for more than 11 years.
 
Martial Arts in the Service of Psychotherapy: The Emergence of the Motoric Ego
How often - in different life situations - you felt helpless? Have you been in situation where you felt unable to push back a person that invaded your physical or emotional space? Daring to protect ourselves doesn’t always come easily. Were you, as a child, given the option to say ‘NO’? In this workshop we will use martial art elements, combined with Biodynamic body-psychotherapy methods, to explore progressing from non-symbolic movement to symbolic interaction; how we may regain a sense of ownership over our own body, and how we can enjoy our inner strength and clear boundaries

Jane Bacon, PhD, is a Jungian Analyst (IGAP, UKCP), Focusing Trainer, Teacher of the Discipline of Authentic Movement and Emerita Professor University of Chichester. Her teaching and psychotherapeutic practice is informed body-based approaches to trauma therapy, Analytical Psychology and practice-as-research in performance. Recent publications: Authentic Movement as wellbeing practice’, in Dance and Movement for Wellbeing, OUP, 2017; ‘Informed by the goddess: Explicating a processual methodology’, Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, 4:1, 2018; Authentic Movement: a field of practices’ Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 7.2, 2015.

Authentic Movement
Authentic Movement is a practice of developing a present moment awareness of our internal world and of finding language to name that experience. It was originally called active imagination in movement as it was developed out of both dance and Jungian approaches to psychotherapy. In this workshop we will attend to our present moment awareness and explore ways in which this practice enables patients to name and work with inexplicable affective states by developing a symbolic approach to body and mind.

Dr Rita Fiumara-Liss is a member of the Italian School of Biosystemic Therapy.  She has studied Jungian psychology and family therapy (with Professor Luigi Cancrini). Dr Fiumara-Liss conducts  group psychotherapy and is author of the chapter, “From Suffering to Emotion,” published in Biosystemic Therapy, Editor Franco Angeli, 2004 and also “The Re-enactment of "Death of the Father in Childhood”, in Biosystemic Counseling, 2009. She is teaching Biosystemic therapy at Bologna School of Biosystemic Therapy, and running groups in Rome, Florence, Prato, and elsewhere.

Fabiana De Luca graduated from the University La Sapienza in Rome in Arts and Sciences of Digital Entertainment. She has been collaborating with the Italian Biosystemic School for 11 years as an assistant to Dr Jerome Liss and Dr Rita Fiumara. Presently she helps Dr Fiumara during the training groups, creating and projecting teaching tools of the Biosystemic School such as slides and videos.

Rhythm in Biosystemic therapy

The experience of rhythm is the vibration, which passes through all beings, animate and inanimate, giving the premonition of a cosmic communion, which connects the universe and sustains it in an organic and balanced manner. We pass from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic and vice versa according to a rapid or slow rhythm, according to the alternation of opposite and tuned; when this agreement is lacking there is an inadequate rhythm for attunement with the other. One of the foundations of the Biosystemic method is the deep listening that has its rules, one being attunement.

Professor Helen Payne, PhD, works at the University of Hertfordshire and is a registered psychotherapist (UKCP) and dance movement psychotherapist (ADMP UK). She trained in the 1990s in the discipline of authentic movement (AM) and employs an integrative psychotherapeutic model in which she trains arts therapists and psychotherapists. She has been active leading research and practice with people with medically unexplained symptoms for over 20 years significantly contributing to the field nationally and internationally with the design of The BodyMind Approach (incorporating AM) to support self-management in the NHS. Recent publications include The BodyMind Approach for patients with medically unexplained symptoms to learn to self-manage, by Helen Payne and Susan Brooks, Frontiers in Psychology, 2018;9, and is also an editor for the recently published Routledge International Handbook of Embodied Perspectives in Psychotherapy: Approaches from Dance Movement and Body Psychotherapies, 2019.

Susan Brooks, MSc; MA; MBA; CQSW; HCPC Reg. FHEA; Retired Senior Lecturer University of Hertfordshire. Areas of special interest: Medically Unexplained Symptoms; Mental Health; Substance Misuse; Bio-psychosocial approaches; Research. She was a Director in the University of Hertfordshire’s spin-out Pathways2Wellbeing and has co-authored a number of papers with Professor Helen Payne on Medically Unexplained Symptoms.

Dance Movement Psychotherapy: Synchronous Group Rhythms for Reducing Chronic Pain in People with Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS)
In this workshop we will explore how moving together in group rhythms can support the reduction of medically unexplained chronic pain. There will be time to experience a practical session, engage in discussion as well as ask questions.

Tina Warnock has been practicing music therapy since 2000, having trained at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, following a degree in Social Psychology from Sussex University. Her clinical focus is voice work in music therapy, and she has several publications on the subject of ‘Voice and the Self’. She is currently undertaking further training in the advanced music therapy method Vocal Psychotherapy with Dr Diane Austin (based in New York), which focuses on the treatment of trauma through voicework. Tina heads Belltree Music Therapy CIC in Brighton alongside her clinical work and supervision practice and is director for Vocal Psychotherapy UK. She is a visiting lecturer on the MA Music Therapy at Roehampton University and teaches their Music Therapy Summer School. She has previously worked for seven years on London-based NHS teams with both children and adults. Tina is an accomplished singer and multi-instrumentalist, having written and performed her own songs for over 30 years.

Voice and the Therapeutic Relationship
In this workshop we will explore the complex relationship that we have with our voices from birth and how the voice, as part of our bodies, both reveals and conceals our emotional experience, bringing rich material to the therapeutic relationship. We will consider the natural musicality of the voice of the healthy infant in the pre-verbal stage, with reference to Stern’s ‘Forms of Vitality’ (2010), how this is linked to an individual’s capacity for playfulness and their consequent emotional resilience later in life. We will look at the impact of developmental trauma and emotional distress on the voice and how this can be addressed through the reparative techniques used in Vocal Psychotherapy. We will also think about our own voices in the therapy room and how this may impact on our clients.

Ann Sloboda is Head of Music Therapy at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. She has worked as a music therapist since 1985 and and has many years of experience of clinical practice and team leadership, in the NHS and Higher Education. She is a past Chair of the Association of Professional Music Therapists. She has published and and given many conference presentations, on the subjects of music therapy with eating disorders, PTSD, adults in forensic psychiatry and the supervision of music therapists. She qualified as a psychoanalyst in 2012 and has a psychoanalytic practice  alongside her music therapy work. 
 
An experiential workshop in music therapy improvisational techniques
This is an experiential workshop. It is not intended as a therapy group, but will be run in a similar way to an open group in a music therapy context. The activities will involve using a range of simple percussion instruments (where technical expertise is not required), and participant are also welcome, but not required, to use voice if they wish. After a short introduction, the group will share in several musical improvisations, with time to reflect in between as needed. The use of these techniques with a range of participants, including those suffering from PTSD, will be discussed.

Elizabeth Nightingale: After graduating from Queen Margaret University in 2013, Elizabeth gained clinical experience with adults with neurological disorders and worked with children with a range of needs including developmental delay, behavioural difficulties, and trauma. She later trained as a Neurologic Music Therapist and MATADOC assessor and continues to acquire specialist experience in brain injury and neurodisability through providing NMT and MATADOC assessments for medico-legal cases. She has also had her work and research published in the Brain & Spinal Injury Handbook, Journal of Dementia Care, and the British Journal of Music Therapy. Elizabeth additionally holds the role of Neuro Music Therapy Services Manager at Chiltern.

Kasia Sikora-Black: Kasia completed her Masters in Music Therapy at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Following additional specialist training in Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT) and music therapy with infants in neonatal intensive care (NICU-MT), Kasia’s clinical work is predominantly in hospital settings, including neonatal intensive care and adult neuro-rehabilitation. She works with clients across their lifespan, and is passionate about working with children and young people during times of transition.

Rhythmic, Sensory and Instrumental Entrainment to Music: A Neurological Perspective
Each person is a musical being. Recent advances in neuro-imaging have shown the unique capacity that music and auditory stimuli have within the brain. This reinforces the strong evidence-base for using music to assist with rehabilitation and help patients adapt during illness and injury. This workshop will introduce the 3 sensorimotor techniques within Neurologic Music Therapy (NMT) and explore the therapeutic application through video case studies and live exercises.  NMT informed techniques can be utilised alongside traditional models of music therapy to support patients in a holistic approach, combining functional goals with overall well-being.

Emily Carlson received her Bachelor’s of Music in Music Therapy from Western Michigan University. She began her career as a music therapist in special education and private settings, working primarily with children with autism spectrum disorders. She received her Master’s in Music, Mind and Technology from the University of Jyväskylä in 2012, where she also completed her doctorate in 2018, studying under Petri Toiviainen and Birgitta Burger. Her doctoral research focused primarily on using motion capture to understand music-induced movement in individual and dyadic contexts. Her current work is focused on the application of embodied cognition and motion capture to music therapy research, particularly for children with autism. She is also interested in developing opportunities for closer interdisciplinary collaboration between music therapy and music cognition researchers.

Methods in motion capture research with applications to music therapy
Direct measurement of human movement (i.e., motion capture) has supported avenues of inquiry into human psychology for more than fifty years. Although motion capture has been used to study dance movement and music performance in individual and social contexts, it has as yet been applied to music therapy research only to a limited degree. Methods for directly measuring movement can be as simple and portable as accelerometers present in ubiquitous smart phones and tablets or as complex as a permanent laboratory space fitted with multiple infrared cameras. This workshop will provide participants with an overview of motion capture technologies and analysis methods, including new developments in the use of video capture methods, and how these methods have been employed in research in fields related to music therapy. The workshop will conclude with time for structured and free discussion about how these methods could be best applied to music therapy research, particularly in relation to music therapy for children with autism.

Cornelia Bent, MA, HCPC, BAMT, is a UK-registered Music Therapist who has worked for over twelve years with a wide range of client groups in a variety of settings, including the NHS, education and charity sector. Within her current clinical practice in adult mental health, she often collaborates with other professionals and contributes clinically to arts psychotherapies research trials. Cornelia is the co-editor of the book "Working Across Modalities in the Arts Therapies - Creative Collaborations" (Routledge) and she regularly presents at conferences nationally and internationally.

Leah Crowe RDMP, PGDIp, BA hons is an ADMP UK Registered Dance Movement Psychotherapist with 20yrs NHS clinical experience with diverse groups and individuals in adult mental health, CAMHS and with Older Adults. She has also worked with mothers and babies in the Sure Start programme. Within her current clinical practice she often collaborates with other disciplines and presents her collaborative work at national conferences.

Collaborations in Music and Dance Movement Psychotherapy
Combining Music and Dance Movement Psychotherapy is pioneering work within our professions, which are usually separate disciplines. However, more recent publications (Colbert and Bent) have addressed the benefits of mixed-modality working in the Arts Psychotherapies . Our clinical work suggests that combining music and dance movement psychotherapies can allow for increased sensory awareness. This can be used through the group process and reflection to increase internal resources and opportunities for self- regulation. This workshop will offer an experience of the interplay of body /sounds/rhythm in collaborative group work for practitioners to reflect on and make links to clinical use in an adult mental health setting, based on the therapists clinical collaborative work over recent years.

Richard Parker began dancing CI in 2006.  Since then, he has extensively explored this form with many inspiring teachers from around the world, including Karen Nelson, KJ Holmes, Nita Little, Andrew Harwood, Ray Chung, Martin Keogh, Scott Wells, Benno Voorham, Joerg Hassmann & Daniel Werner and has been teaching himself for over 5 years.

Contact Improvisation
Contact Improvisation (CI) is an embodied, meditative and deeply connecting dance practice. It works with the principle of how we listen and communicate our intentions of movement through touch.  Within this workshop, we'll create a safe and playful container to creatively explore the basics of how two bodies can move together as one within a spontaneously unfolding improvise contact dance.

Katy Dymoke is a Dance Movement Psychotherapist and supervisor, in Health, Social Care, education, and private practice.  Katy is program co-ordinator of the Body-Mind Centering® program in the UK and Poland with Embody-Move, a BMC teacher, and practitioner, the embodied approaches inform therapeutic and creative practices. Since 1994 Katy has directed Touchdown Dance, a company of visually impaired and sighted dancers, providing training, workshops and creative projects locally and internationally. Katy is a writer and researcher completing a PhD on her work.

Body mind centering and Dance movement psychotherapy
This workshop will consider movement and touch as forms of non-verbal communication in a dyad relationship using Body-Mind Centering and Dance Movement Psychotherapy.  The skin is the body's physical membrane. it is protective and also responsive, a living boundary and barrier but receptive to other.  Movement with and from the membrane generates a sense of containment and also the possibility of change, of self regulation or transformation.  Other external membranes support and guide our relationships, other internal membranes give a sense of vitality, of our body as a unitary whole. Please come in comfortable clothing.

Simonetta is Italian dance artist based in London. She teaches at Trinity Laban, and Goldsmiths University and London Contemporary Dance School. Her work is informed by more than 30 years of dancing, teaching and choreographing. Her choreography has been for dance companies, student pieces, large scale opera, improvised performance, site specific and movement direction for theatre. She taught for more than 20 years in Italy and kept Contact Improvisation alive in Roma for 10 years with her classes and jams. She has been a guest teacher in Germany, Colombia, UK, Norway, Israel, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Taiwan. She obtained the Post Graduated Diploma in Choreography at London Contemporary Dance School, she is qualified teacher of the Feldenkrais Method and she holds the Teacher Certificate of the Royal Academy of Dance.
 
Easier Sitting: A Brief Introduction to Feldenkrais
The Method can permanently improve our posture, balance and coordination, awakening our innate capacity for life-long vitality and continuing self-development. By heightening our awareness of movement, breathing and posture, the Feldenkrais Method brings us closer to realising our full human potential. Bringing this into our lives, we learn to move more freely, with great ease, flexibility and grace.