Marian Chace (31 October 1896 – 19 July 1970) is one of the founders of modern

dance therapy Dance/movement therapy (DMT) in USA/ Australia or dance movement psychotherapy (DMP) in the UK is the psychotherapeutic use of movement and dance to support intellectual, emotional, and motor functions of the body. As a modality of the creati ...

. Marian Chace was born 31 October 1896 in

Providence, Rhode Island Providence is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Rhode Island. One of the oldest cities in New England, it was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams, a Reformed Baptist theologian and religious exile from the Massachusetts Bay ...

, the daughter of Daniel Champlin Chace, a journalist and editor, and Harriet Edgaretta (Northrop) Chace. Her younger siblings were Marjorie (1899–1991), Olive (1905–1977), and Edgar Northrop Chace (1908–1983). She studied modern

dance Dance is a performing art form consisting of sequences of movement, either improvised or purposefully selected. This movement has aesthetic and often symbolic value. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...

and

choreography Choreography is the art or practice of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which Motion (physics), motion or Visual appearance, form or both are specified. ''Choreography'' may also refer to the design ...

with

Ted Shawn Ted Shawn (born Edwin Myers Shawn; October 21, 1891 – January 9, 1972) was a male pioneer of American modern dance. He created the Denishawn School together with his wife Ruth St. Denis. After their separation he created the all-male company Te ...

and

Ruth St. Denis Ruth St. Denis (born Ruth Denis; January 20, 1879 – July 21, 1968) was an American pioneer of modern dance, introducing eastern ideas into the art. She was the co-founder of the American Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts and the teac ...

at the

Denishawn The Denishawn School of Dancing and Related Arts, founded in 1915 by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn in Los Angeles, California, helped many perfect their dancing talents and became the first dance academy in the United States to produce a professiona ...

School of Dance and started work as a dance performer. She later moved to Washington DC and opened her own studio. As she developed her teaching she believed that the body and mind are interrelated, and was influenced by the work of

Harry Stack Sullivan Herbert "Harry" Stack Sullivan (February 21, 1892, Norwich, New York – January 14, 1949, Paris, France) was an American Neo-Freudian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who held that "personality can never be isolated from the complex interpersonal ...

. She began to teach in Washington D.C. and Wondered why people who were not wanting to be performers continued to take dance classes. She began to change her teaching methods as she observed her students closely. Her students reported feelings of well being which intrigued local doctors, some of the National Institutes of Health, who began to send some of their patients to her classes. Her approach developed into the use of body action, symbolism, therapeutic movement relationship, and rhythmic group activity when she eventually joined the staff at St. Elizabeths hospital in southeast Washington D.C. and studied at the Washington School of Psychiatry. Chace taught in schools and hospitals advocating and lecturing on the therapeutic benefits of dance/body movement. She worked for number of years with patients at Chestnut Lodge in Rockville Maryland. She taught a course at Turtle Bay Music school in New York City for a number of years. With others in the field she enabled the founding of the American dance therapy Association in 1966 and became its 1st president.

References

* Marian Chace biography www.ADTA.org: "Marian Chace: Her Papers" by Harris Chaiklin. Columbia, Maryland:American Dance Therapy Association, 1975. * Foundations of Dance movement Therapy: The life and work of Marian Chace (1993) Marian Chace Memorial fund * http://healthpronet.org/ahp_month/04_05.html 1896 births 1970 deaths American female dancers 20th-century American dancers Dance therapists 20th-century American women {{dance-bio-stub