Dance, Health and Wellbeing

In a world full of uncertainty, instability, global health challenges, and intersecting crises, we, as humans, often search for ways to nurture care, empathy, and justice, to cope with and improve our lives. Dance activities have long reinforced our sense of shared humanity through social, emotional, creative, cognitive, and political engagement. Dance engages us in experiencing the moving body as physical, mental/psychological, and social, through activities that enable qualities and experiences that make us human, such as the ability to connect. Through connection, creative meaning-making, artistic risk-taking, and critical thinking, arts engage people in holistic body and mind and creative experiences. There is a growing international commitment to promote engagement with arts/dance as having benefit to public health and wellbeing. This chapter discusses dance as the moving body and a holistic and embodied human experience that is aesthetic, artistic, and creative. Dance and health and wellbeing as therapy/therapeutic, creative health and dance on prescription, and benefits of dance on social, cognitive, physical, and mental health are explored.