Transforming illness experience: a co-creative dance practice for young cancer survivors

Dance and the creative arts offer powerful tools to support coping with illness and finding meaning after disruptive life events. This talk offers an account of a lived experience of cancer and how illness—as a disruptive event—enables philosophical reflection and the exploration of ‘other’ ways of being-in-the-world. Based on video material collected over ten years of cancer treatments, dance performances and creative embodied practices, I drew on an autoethnographic and phenomenological approach to illness to provide insights into forms of embodiment that expand and enrich biomedical perspectives of the body.
This work provides the theoretical underpinnings of the research project ‘Transforming illness experience: a co-creative dance practice for young cancer survivors’ developed in collaboration between researchers at the Department of Sports Science and Clinical Biomechanics (IOB), University of Southern Denmark (SDU) and the Department of Clinical Medicine at Aarhus University. The project explores the healing potential of engaging in co-creative dance practices for young cancer survivors and aims to inform the design and implementation of rehabilitation programs at the intersection of arts and health offered to cancer patients in Denmark.
Cancer rehabilitation often entails a long and difficult process, as undergoing the stressful and traumatic experience of illness and cancer treatments can lead to a diminished sense of agency. Through qualitative research methods, and an interdisciplinary methodology including an ethnographic approach, narrative perspectives, and video-graphic documentation, the project investigates how dance as a creative and expressive form of movement may rehabilitate not only patients’ physical body, but also their sense of agency and identity. Dance, a form of physical activity that incorporates elements of creativity, self-expression, and social interaction, has the potential to provide a holistic form of rehabilitation for cancer survivors.