ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the embodied, relational, experiential learning process of a master of arts level programme in Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP). It explores the ‘transition’ to becoming a professional DMP practitioner. To engage in politics of gender can often require courage and resilience in working with cultural expectations of how men and women think, behave and socially or personally interact with one another. Marina Rova acknowledges the ‘problem of empathy’ and offers the term ‘kinaesthetic intersubjective relating’ instead. In DMP, the term more often used is empathic mirroring or kinaesthetic empathy, where the bodily mirroring of a client or student’s movement allows them to experience themselves as having been met and understood in what they are conveying. In teaching, the students would be supported in developing their contact functions’ awareness through a variety of sensitising experiences, e.g. working with proximity between one another.
