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A local dance company explores mental health through movement art.
Ashley Wilson Fellers
The MHIM dancers work to make invisible mental health challenges visible.
This May, as the nation recognizes Mental Health Awareness Month, many are exploring their mental health needs for the first time. There are a lot of reasons for increasing urgency surrounding the subject: two years of pandemic-related anxiety, social and political unrest, and economic instability, to name a few.
And maybe that’s why Mental Health in Motion feels so relevant.
“I want people to know that it’s okay not to be okay,” says Lisa Linger, who founded the unusual dance company in 2017. “We’re all not okay to some degree.”
A former dancer and mental health clinician, Linger merged her skills in 2017, gathering a group of dancers with a unique mission. MHIM uses every performance to spark conversations about mental wellness – and to make difficult subjects approachable.
“I had this seed of an idea,” Linger explains. “Was there a way I could use the visuals created in dance and in choreography to help teach people about mental health? [Could] I turn those invisible, complex aspects of mental health into something that is visible?”
It turns out she could. At her first performance, “Doorways of Change” – an exploration of transitions, performed alongside the works of local painter Karen Carter – “The response was beyond anything I could have imagined,” Linger remembers. “People saw their own stories in new ways … They came up to me afterward and shared what kind of change they were going through … It really confirmed that this is what I was meant to do.”
Since then, MHIM has brought to life the stories of young stroke survivors, refugees, individuals living with HIV, and folks navigating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The team often collaborates with other local performers, and they create each piece alongside those who have lived experiences in the subject, or who can lend professional expertise. When it’s time to go onstage, Linger offers the mic to collaborators, giving them space to share their lived experiences in an authentic way.
“Our goal is not to be a voice for the voiceless,” she says. “Everyone has a voice. We’re just translators into a different form of communication.”
To find out more about MHIM’s latest projects or watch their 2021 film, “Shades of Our Grief,” go to mentalheathinmotion.org.
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