About a million Americans live with Parkinson’s Disease. It’s a chronic, progressive brain disorder that slowly robs a person of the ability to control their movements.
There’s no cure, but there may be some novel approaches – like dance – to easing the symptoms.
Can dance help retrain the brain of Parkinson’s patients?
“Dancing and continuing to move the body provides endless access to joy and vitality,” says Rachel Balaban, an adjunct lecturer at Brown University. “I am co-founder and co-director of Artists and Scientists as Partners at Brown, which includes this DAPers class, or Dance for the Aging Population.”
We’re in a dance studio on the campus of Brown University. Her students are mostly members of the community, and they’re getting ready for an upcoming performance. They find a chair in a wide circle.
Balaban’s students are mostly older, and many have Parkinson’s Disease. She says that no matter your age or the progression of your disease, dance can help unlock that ability to feel joy. And it can do more.
“Clearly there’s the physical aspect which helps flexibility, and coordination and gait and posture. We also see a real cognitive aspect where people are connecting right/left sides of their body and they’re learning movement sequencing and memory, which really helps with their cognitive processing,” says Balaban.
What’s happening in the brain of someone who has Parkinson’s is that it is slowly stopping the production of a chemical called dopamine. With less and less dopamine, a person has less and less ability to regulate their movements and even their emotions. It progress like this: first, you might notice a slight tremor, perhaps along one side of your body. Next you might have trouble walking, lose your balance. Toward the end of this debilitating disease, you may be wheelchair bound, even have cognitive problems
So how can a person facing this chronic, progressive disease even consider dancing?
“Some of those in their 90s, wheelchair-bound, barely moving, and you can see they’re dancing with their eyes. It’s lovely,” Balaban says.
But is it really dance? Balaban says of course it is. And as her students begin to move, it’s easy to see the grace, the rhythm, each moving at his or her own pace. Sometimes they sweep their arms in the air. Sometimes they fold over and scoop up from the ground. They wave their arms to create shapes and tap out rhythms on their legs.
“The idea is to take this very rigorous art form and to show how it can be interpreted without losing the rigor, keeping the essence of the dance and staying true to the choreographer’s intentions.”
Rhode Island Hospital Neurosurgeon Dr. Wael Asaad says the science bears out what Balaban is doing. He says that people with Parkinson’s as they lose more and more dopamine, may feel frozen or unable to move the way they used to.
“The fundamental problem when you lose some of that dopamine isn’t that you’re unable to make those same movements. It’s just that you’re much less likely to make those movements,” Asaad says. “The brain sort of makes an unconscious calculation that it’s not as worthwhile. So the movements are decreased in amplitude.”
Amplitude – and speed. Asaad says dance can help because it emphasizes those qualities of movement.
“If you amplify the good movements, that still exist but less frequently, if you amplify those movements, you might actually be able to pull your behavioral state, pull you out of those symptoms more robustly.”
Over time, Parkinson’s patients might actually restore some of the abilities they’ve lost.
“What you’re doing is making these movements more pleasurable, more exciting, more interesting. You’re retraining your brain to make bigger and more bold movements,” says Asaad.
Providence resident and Parkinson’s patient Steven Quinn has been dancing with Rachel Balaban’s group for a few years. At first, he says, it was just a lark. Now it’s a lifeline.
“It’s just, every week, I know, if nothing else, at least for that little glimpse of time, the sun’s going to shine. It’s just a wonderful attitude.”
Quinn is in the earlier stages of the disease. He’s able to dance in his chair, moving his arms as Balaban calls out the steps. But he says the class has provided something else: “It definitely has given me a lot more self-confidence in my movement.”
