The Ohio State Dance and BalletMet 2 collaborated for a dance tour that is igniting discussion about mental health.
The Martha W. Farmer Theatre at the Lima Ohio State Campus held the “Dance2U” tour that is raising awareness about mental health through the art of dance. Talking about mental health can be hard sometimes, whether it's your own or someone close to you. The Dance2U tour is meant to open the conversation about mental health in a new light. Two pieces were performed, Anna Sokolow’s Rooms and George Balanchine's The Four Temperaments. Both pieces were meant to express feelings like longing, isolation, anxiety, and melancholy. You could feel both the pain and joy expressed in the bodies of these dancers
Ambre Emory-Maier, the assistant director of BalletMet 2 says, “The body and the mind work together in concert and what we know from dance is that we experience our emotions and our thoughts through the body.”
Sometimes your emotions are hard to talk about. But to one dancer, dance became a new language.
“Vocally expressing what I have to say is difficult for me at times," says Gianna Buffano. "And dance just opens up a whole new realm to say something that you can’t really say with words and a lot of times mental health is something that a lot of people struggle with saying.”
And if the two dance numbers weren’t starting conversations about mental health, the panel afterward did. The panelists included the OSU dancers and four OSU professors who are involved with mental health programs at the school. They have just three more dates for the Dance2U tour, and you can find them at the Ohio State Dance website. These performances are free and open to the public.
