1. DO WE KNOW ABOUT ALL THE POSSIBLE RESOURCES OF HEALTH PROMOTION IN PROFESSIONAL BALLET COMPANIES?
This article intends to provide health promotion to professional dancers and create new opportunities for better self-care in ballet companies. It also expands the traditional way of using dance and movement therapy (DMT), and it challenges the conventional approaches implemented by therapists who work with ballet dancers. We all know that professional ballet companies usually work with a health team, including doctors and physiotherapists, mostly with physiatry (physical medicine and rehabilitation) and sports medicine background. 
But do we know enough about other methods for protecting the mental health of dancers?
As a physiotherapist with a deeper understanding of the therapeutic values of movement and dance, I would love to share my points with you. I'm convinced that dancers are giving it all to create fantastic stage products and provide them to the audience. But as a therapist, I'm also worried if dancers get enough space for recreation in the ballet company where they work. It is also a question of classical ballet companies having enough knowledge about other fields of physiotherapies focusing on mental wellbeing. For example, psychomotor physiotherapy (a traditional Norwegian physiotherapy method) or dance- and movement therapy (DMT). My impression is that approaches like those mentioned above aren't known enough. Sports medicine and physiatry-related approaches to dance are still the dominating ones in ballet companies. I hypothesize that especially DMT isn't explored so much as a source of wellbeing and recreation for professional dancers. That's why I want to look at some crucial aspects of the dancers' everyday life and what DMT could bring to improve its quality and promote better health in professional dance. 


2. HEALTH RISKS IN PROFESSIONAL DANCER CAREER
As a part of an audience, thanks to the mechanisms of kinesthetic empathy, thanks to my body and its relational existence, I'm able to develop my own embodied sensibility to the stage products that dancers create. Through watching ballet, I can connect to this world of beautiful expression and movement in a more integrated way. More, thanks to professional dancers, I can stay attuned to myself too. So first of all, I'd like to express my gratitude for the work the dancers do for me and others. But, I'm also aware that providing art for professional dancers can lead to some health risks for professional dancers. The way we treat and look at the body must have consequences for good health. I believe that the way the dancers' everyday schedule is built up, with rehearsals, alternative training, nutrition plan, physiotherapy work, public&media appointments, can harm the individual perception of itself as a subject. An individual can notice this harm as a need to verbalize feelings and show yourself from the side created by you only. Some dancers can take care of their needs; others who are not so aware or can't find spaces where they can breathe on their own may suffer from physical pain or a mental notion of disintegration and chaos. The dancer's professional everyday life constantly challenges the body image and voice of a primary perspective of experiences gained throughout a long day.
How do the dancers copy with this externalization of their bodies, especially during the high season of performance?
If you want to improve your self-care strategies as a dancer, follow the three steps in my Workbook for Dancers here:

3. COPING STRATEGIES IN PROFESSIONAL DANCE AND THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MEDIA


There are many coping strategies to master the challenges of the dancers' work life. As you can see in my Workbook, practicing self-care strategies and having some tools available during a stressful performance is a big step forward. 
Some ballet companies know for sure how to offer that I'm naming 'the recreational space' for a hardworking dancer. By that, I mean offers within a company's health team that include classes in relaxation through own movement or wellbeing classes with a focus on the non-pressure oriented movement practice and the creative movement. So, if you are a professional dancer in a company who experiences a lack of access to those expanded opportunities for recreation, maybe it can be interesting for you to hear about my perspective as a physiotherapist for dancers with the background I mentioned before. 
But first, I would like to share with you my observation from the world of social media. I'm observing an exciting phenomenon of using social media like, for example, Instagram as a tool for creating balance to the subjective, experience-based world. Instagram seems to function as a space for verbalization of the primary- perspective experiences that only are their voice for many professional dancers. The verbalization through short comments on their pictures as a medium for expression seems today to be a sign of a need to protect the voice of the primary-perspective experiences, not only for professional dancers but also for many «normal» people. As I see it, the more «stars» they become, the more they show this need to tell us how they feel and experience reality. Sometimes the verbalization and the images are not 100% authentic and do not show the exact content of how the individual experiences their lived reality. Sometimes dancers are honest and state how they are doing right now- with no filter. The purpose of this article isn't to criticize the dancers or Instagram as a medium of expression; I'm only sharing my fascination about the noticeable need dancers might have to verbalize and show how they experience their ballet life. I'm also interested in how we therapists recognize this need, how we embrace it, and how (and if!) we are trying to develop better methods for preventing mental and physical harm in dance. I mean, we live in a new era of social media, which demands different approaches to the promotion of health. 
On Instagram, I often read the picture comments coming from professional dancers like: «the current mood,» «this is going to be an exciting day,» «privileged,» «that's how I'm feeling right now,» «scared,» «grateful» etc. Some expressions are more straightforward, others more camouflaged through quotes or poetic words. Many of them show the need to say something about how a dancer EXISTS AS A SUBJECT. This little post on Instagram is only the dancer's own, no one else's, not the choreographer's, nor the company leaders. That's why it probably means so much to a dancer! Not necessarily how many 'likes' it is getting. And I believe that even when the pictures often have this perfect ballet scenery, what does matter to a dancer, is the possibility of creating a feeling of community, sharing, and self-expressing.


4. IS INSTAGRAM, A SELF-PROMOTION OR A SELF-PROTECTION TOOL?
Another aspect of my analysis of this social media phenomenon is Instagram as a self-leadership tool for dancers. Professional dancers often express the need to post motivational words and quotes that guide them through the day and inspire others. Those who post more frequently also tend to inform us about how they feel at the end of a ballet day. Sometimes, the posted pictures express the body in exhaustion, discomfort, lying down, or a pose indicating strain. Very often, the images express joy and happiness too! So it's not a 'black or white way of a dancer presenting themself on Instagram. Whatever the presentation is, my impression is that this is communicating SOMETHING. My point is this way of using social media, for many dancers, can be a therapy, a self-motivational tool, or very simply, a space which they can create only by themselves. Of course, in some cases, the dancers use Instagram with the intention of self-promotion. But, let's think about the case when a dancer already is a «star» in their company. This dancer doesn't need much more promotion. So, what is about this self-promotion behavior? What kind of message does it bring to us? Is it an act of self-promotion or self-protection? 


5. COVERING THE GAP IN WELLBEING AND TREATMENT OFFERS FOR BALLET DANCERS
As a therapist working with dancers, I automatically follow my instinct of providing professional care, and that's why I'm so engaged in this subject. I also believe that there is a need for something else that can cover the gap in today's understanding of health promotion offers for dancers. I trust a new approach to health promotion for professional dancers that needs promoting in ballet companies in our modern world. So, how about expanding the recreational opportunities the movement, the dance, and the body itself offers in a more internal, subjective, and therapeutic way? In other words, how about using the dance-and movement therapy approach and method grounded in the healing roots of dance to support the dancers and improve their wellbeing? I trust that dancers need to protect their subjective existence to prevent mental and physical discomforts and secure a long-lasting career. Social media is not the only and appropriate opportunity for mental recreation and probably neither the conventional therapy offers for dancers in ballet companies are sufficient to cover the promotion of emotional self-care. In the next point, you will read why I'm so passionate about the DMT for professional dancers and why I wish this therapy more in professional companies. 


6. USING DANCE THERAPY FOR DANCERS
Through my studies in dance- and movement therapy (DMT) in Norway, I discovered that dancers have a unique opportunity to use precisely the same resource: movement and dance in a way that secures the expression of their activity and feeling of their grounding to the world. Dance- and movement therapy as a personal process-oriented approach for professional ballet dancers seems to be an undiscovered option for artists working in companies. My observation is that freelance dancers seem to be more aware of the risks of their choice dedicating their bodies to create products. They often search for additional and cross-training classes where they can find self-development and recreation, such as kinetic awareness, improvisation, yoga, authentic movement, body awareness, etc. Since my heart is dedicated primarily to ballet dancers in companies exposed to more extensive health risks, I wish to change the situation where the protection of the ballet dancers' health doesn't have the same opportunities that other types of dancers do. I also mean that the concept of health protection needs to expand in alternatives than traditional dance medicine has to offer. One way of solving this is to promote group- and individual classes in therapeutic-oriented movement and dance within ballet companies. As I see the dance-and movement therapy approach, it has a massive range of opportunities for dancers. DMT can solve the challenge of taking care of the dancer's primary perspective voice of experiences.
How? Through the verbalization, the owner moved from the deepest layers of itself, the transformation of feelings, and then recovering from the ego-influenced behaviors. These are the elements that are essential to this therapy form. I recently wrote an assignment about «How the Dance-and Movement Therapy method can prevent burnout in professional dance and promote better health.» My discussion ended up in thoughts about the opportunities the DMT provides, which are as follow: 
DMT as a method for rebuilding the body image
DMT as a tool for the exploration of own potential for recovery 
DMT as a space for sharing in a supportive, collective environment of a group
DMT as a tool for increasing awareness of body sensations and emotions, and transformation of those
DMT as a method for emotional integration and the therapeutic containing
DMT as a method for establishing the body contact and protection of the subjective dancer perspective
As we can see, this list is rich in content, and ballet dancers could benefit from it!


7. DANCE THERAPY AS A MORE ORGANIC TOOL FOR DANCERS' RECREATION
Today's social media canals point at a vital need the ballet dancers might have. That needs a bigger space to exist in a subjective world of's voice of experience. Are social media the only thing we have to create this space for recreation and protection of the body and the soul of dancers? It's a modern channel, but as I see it, it limits us as it's not- embodied and distanced from experiences we can truly sense. Sometimes, this channel, this virtual space, can be destructive, although I don't want to focus on these mechanisms here. My final words are: as in homeopathy, let's give the dancers through their authentic bodywork the stimuli's that can provoke an against- response and, in the result, heal the negative consequences of using the body as an artistic- and performance tool. 


Let's use more movement- and dance therapy. It is such a simple conclusion, but I believe, so true! What's great about it is that we can use the same element, DANCE, to create a recreational, rebalancing, and healing space for professional ballet dancers- the resource they already possess. It is maybe an untypical way of seeing it, and my point of view on the social media canals may even feel uncomfortable. But, after my recent studies in DMT, I ended up with a strong belief that this might be this new way of thinking, coaching, and looking at therapy and recreation for dancers in ballet companies. Through reading my article, I hope that more company leaders will see the potential the DMT offers to professional ballet dancers. We together can find ways of implementing it as a part of the regular health- and dancer wellness program. 
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