ABSTRACT
The aim of a case study I conducted at the Special Needs Project of the Royal Academy of Dance in 2003 1 was to determine the extent to which a child with developmental dyspraxia may benefit by attending these dance classes. Dyspraxia is an impairment which affects motor planning, language, perception and thought. I focused on a twelve-year-old girl who was diagnosed as dyspraxic and as having Asperger’s syndrome. She had attended the special needs dance class for two years and had a range of needs that could be addressed by dance tuition. She had problems with verbal communication, poor muscle tone, difficulties with balance, coordination and motor planning, and was easily distracted. She had perceptuo-motor problems, in particular difficulties with proprioceptive feedback, spatial awareness, directionality and bilateral integration. Her observed strengths were an ability to imitate a teacher’s actions when the teacher was directly in front of her, an emerging ability to perform homologous actions, an ability to respond to some metaphoric imagery and an ability to establish a rapport with significant adults. She had expressed her desire to remember her own dances.
