Dance and the critical medical humanities

Emily Davis, Daniel P Jones, and Gabriela Minden reflect on the potential of dance in the critical medical humanities following their one-day event ‘Dancing Across Disciplines’ held at Durham University in April 2026.

Introduction

The arts constitute a critical and creative practice within the medical humanities, as recently articulated by Johnstone et al. (2026) in Art and the Critical Medical Humanities. Still, even as such critical conversations and collaborations progress, performing arts, including dance, remain relatively unexamined. The ‘Dancing Across Disciplines’ event, hosted by the Moving Bodies Lab at Durham University in April 2026, aimed to address the more limited consideration of dance in the critical medical humanities, generating dialogue across historical, contemporary, and community-based perspectives.

The event was structured around three key domains, ‘Dancing in text’, ‘Dancing through space’, and ‘Dancing across communities’, encompassing opportunities to network, discuss, and articulate the potential of dance across disciplinary boundaries.

Building from the critical, embodied, and creative dialogue stimulated throughout the event, this review considers three key ways dance can contribute to the advancement of the critical medical humanities. As Viney et al. (2015) articulate, a ‘critical’ medical humanities is concerned with extending considerations beyond the clinical encounter to examine health and illness through broader social, cultural, and biological processes and ‘new forms of interdisciplinary and cross-sector collaboration’ – considered here through dance by way of:

1. Enabling creative and productive interdisciplinary entanglement with a wider ‘biomedical culture’
2. Troubling the sites and scales of ‘the medical’
3. Providing more embodied and equitable means of interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration.

Moving beyond words

The first panel, ‘Dancing in text’, opened with Dr Gabriela Minden’s (Durham University) presentation: Poetry and the Body in Anti-Fascist Performance. Gabriela presented archival work on the British dancer and theatre director Rupert Doone (1903–66), discussing how Doone’s theory of theatre positioned the body as a source of intelligence and expression, and connecting this to the political dimensions of his work in the 1930s.  Doone retired following a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS), and Gabriela raised a line of critical inquiry: whether and how a neurological condition might have intersected with the thinking and practice of an artist whose understanding of theatre rested on the epistemological capacities of the moving body.

 Photo by Ahmad Odeh

Such a provocation to consider the power of bodily knowledge, including changes in bodily knowledge amid neurological disease diagnosis and progression, challenges the dominance of cognitive ways of knowing in medicine and the critical medical humanities. This provocation was picked up later in the day by Dr Emily Davis (Durham University) in her presentation: Collaborative Dancemaking with People Living with Multiple Sclerosis. Emily shared how participatory dance-based methods can lend new, expressive, and embodied insights into the health and well-being experiences of dancing with MS, such as around freedom of movement and freedom of expression. These findings showed the potential of dance as a method for tapping into an ‘instinctive’ bodily logic, helping convey the more ineffable, indescribable aspects of lived experience that can remain obscured through more static, discourse-driven methods.  

Together, Gabriela’s historical and Emily’s contemporary perspectives showed the potential of dance and performance to provide insight into the world ‘beyond words’ in the context of the critical medical humanities, with potential to open new lines of inquiry around the body not just as the object of study but as a site of knowledge production. These perspectives position the role of dance not only in service to biomedicine, such as by improving MS symptoms, or in opposition, i.e., challenging MS clinical practice, but rather ‘as productively entangled with a “biomedical culture”’ (Viney et al., 2015); enabling more intertwined, interdisciplinary consideration of moving with MS beyond words, both past and present.  

Re-creating space and place

Dr Megan Girdwood (University of Edinburgh) also articulated the value of embodied knowledge in the first panel, The Empathic Index: Writing Dance in the Asylum. From a historical perspective, Megan examined dance in a particular medical setting – the asylum-  tracing the blurred lines between ‘medical impulse and pathologised dance’, and the potential of the dancing body to transform the ward ‘from a primarily diagnostic into a creative space’. In doing so, she linked expressive movement to therapeutic insight, troubling established treatments and the ward’s logics of control and containment through movements characterised by openness, spontaneity, and freedom.

Later, Dr Daniel P. Jones (Durham University) discussed Tourette Syndrome and dancing the embodyminded experiences of disability in urban and rural spaces. Starting from the notion of rhythm as part of what ‘makes us human’, Daniel articulated the dehumanising nature of discourse around the tourettic body as ‘arrhythmic’. Through movement-based performance art, Daniel challenged this characterisation, surfacing the layered rhythms inherent in the moving tourettic body and the accumulated effects of space and place on these rhythms, including the legitimising effect of performance in the theatre space – ‘a space inviting and opening expectations of the body’ where non-normative bodies are valued as ‘interesting’.

Both Megan’s historical, literary perspective, and Daniel’s contemporary performance practice challenged established assumptions concerning the site and scale of ‘the medical’ in the critical medical humanities. While Megan’s research highlighted how dance pushes against the constraining site of the asylum through expressive, spontaneous, and uninhibited movements, Daniel’s work troubled the ways in which the tourettic rhythms are positioned as non/sub-human by the medical deficit-focused model of disability. Together, these perspectives illustrated the potential of dance in re-creating space and place and, as a result, developing kinaesthetic empathy for ‘reading impulse on and offstage’.  

Embodying engagement

The day also showcased the potential of dance in fostering meaningful cross-sector collaboration and interdisciplinary engagement. Dr Ellen Jeffery (Dance City) in Where movement takes place: ecological collaboration through time-specific performance practices, illustrated how dance is not ‘in but between’ bodies and non-human agents and environments. Her collaborative performance practice with a wildlife trust encouraged and enacted consideration of how we’re ‘all doing but never do alone’, with Ellen’s work aiming to ‘inhabit’ the patterns proposed by the environment itself. For example, when moving in and through light and darkness while dancing outdoors.  

In the final panel, Lewis Hou (Science Ceilidh) in Science Ceilidh: Culturally Engaged Research to Knowledge Systems Change also shared insights into the diverse place-based human and environmental supports needed for community-led research in rural mental health. Lewis shared how in his work across Scotland’s Highlands and Islands, culturally-engaged methods like ceilidh helped to connect and uplift local knowledge in promoting wider systemic change, utilising dance as a means of democratising knowledge exchange.

Both of these examples highlight dance as a means of fostering new forms of culturally responsive community and environmental engagement, alongside supporting cross-discipline and cross-sector collaboration, from rural health promotion to environmental justice. Such place-specific and time-specific modes of engagement like ceilidh also help to promote not only more embodied and relational engagement, but also more equitable engagement, spanning human and non-human agents in a given community and ecosystem.    

Moving forward

The panel discussions closed with Professor Matthew Reason (York St John University), Dance, movement and epistemic agency: Stories from I’m Me, reflecting on his work with learning disabled dance artists and the potential of dance as an ‘epistemic enabler’.  In the ‘silent discussion’ that followed, Matthew’s work stimulated critical discourse around dance as ‘knowledge’, ‘justice’, and ‘agency’, while also urging consideration around ‘for whom’, ‘when’, ‘in what circumstances’ and ‘in what disciplines’ dance holds this power.

Building from this, we see the urgency of dance in the critical medical humanities in supporting generative interdisciplinary entanglements and expanding existing meanings, modes, and collaborations concerning knowledge creation in health contexts. Still, we urge a continued attunement in the context of dance in the critical medical humanities to questions of ‘what kinds of knowledge (body and mind) are valued or excluded, what modes of moving are deemed permissible or otherwise, and who gets to decide?’

 ‘Dancing Across Disciplines’ offered a generative space for examining dance through historical texts, across spaces, and in collaborations within the wider context of the critical medical humanities. We hope these critical and creative conversations stimulated by the day are just the start of further consideration and recognition of the urgency of dance in the critical medical humanities.

About the authors

Emily Davis is a social scientist focused on dance and health, based in the Moving Bodies Lab at Durham University. With a particular interest in those dancing with progressive neurological conditions, her work explores how critical social theory, along with arts-based and movement-based methods, can create new understandings of health and illness. 

Daniel P. Jones is an interdisciplinary researcher specialising in Tourette Syndrome, neurodiversity and disability. His work brings together sociology, human geography and medical humanities to explore lived experiences of health, embodiment and public life, with a focus on developing more inclusive and participatory approaches to health research.

Gabriela Minden is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. She specialises in modernist literature and culture, with a particular focus on the relationship between literature, theatre, dance, and the body.

References

Johnstone, F., Morehead, A., and Wiltshire, I., eds. 2026. Art and the Critical Medical Humanities. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Viney, W., Callard, F., and Woods, A. 2015. ‘Critical Medical Humanities: Embracing Entanglement, Taking Risks.’ Medical Humanities 41 (1): 2–7.