Mental health led the conversation at the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science’s 2022 conference, held at the University of Limerick, in Ireland. The 32nd annual conference was exuberant, with 492 dance medicine specialists, researchers and teaching artists attending in person and an additional 152 participating virtually
Dr. William Hamilton, the beloved dance medicine pioneer, passed away on March 29 at age 90. The New York–based orthopedic surgeon, who was a longtime member of Dance Magazine‘s advisory board, treated a who’s who list of professional dancers through the decades. His intimate knowledge of ballet and its effects on the body enabled scores […]
You had a rough rehearsal. Your foot, which has been bothering you on and off for months, is really hurting today. What do you do? For many dancers, it seems, the answer is “Go to the emergency room.” That’s according to a study recently published in the journal Sports Health. Joshua Honrado, an athletic trainer […]
From a very early age, dancers are taught that pain comes with the territory. When injuries inevitably arise, dancers feel shame, social stigma and tremendous pressure to bounce back as quickly as possible. This means taking a risk by downplaying the severity, or hiding it altogether due to fear.
Between social media posts of ballerinas balancing on BOSUs and fitness influencers doing push-up challenges, dancers are inundated with new cross-training regimens on a daily basis. There’s an endless amount of exercises that could be valuable, but do we need to do them all? How do we create a cross-training budget that leaves us with […]
Not all doctors get what dancers do. Even something as small as how a foot fits in a pointe shoe might not be familiar to a doctor without dance knowledge, says Dr. Kathleen Davenport, company physician with Miami City Ballet and the director of physiatry at Hospital for Special Surgery Florida. “That can be everything […]
Throughout the dance field, artists are proving that early retirement is no longer an inevitability. “The myth that you have to stop dancing once you hit your 30s is pretty much gone,” says Julia Iafrate, founder of the Columbia Dance Medicine clinic in New York City. However, staying healthy requires consistency and hard work. Caring […]
When orthopedic surgeon Dr. Donald Rose founded the Harkness Center for Dance Injuries at NYU Langone Orthopedic Hospital 30 years ago, the average salary for a dancer was about $8,000, he says. “It was very hard for a dancer to get quality medical care,” he remembers. What’s more, he adds, “at the time, dance medicine […]