Compañía Nacional de Danza

Dance for Parkinson’s is part of Dance for PD, an initiative created by the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Brooklyn Parkinson’s Group over 20 years ago. It is now present in more than 300 locations and communities around the world, including our own. The initiative starts from a simple but brilliant idea: if dancers are experts in movement, balance, coordination, learning to think like a dancer has to be beneficial to a person with Parkinson’s.

This year’s meeting was held on March 30 at our headquarters. It was attended by 40 members of the project carried out in Móstoles with the local Parkinson’s Association, their caregivers and relatives and their teachers, Guillermina de Bedoya and Concha Mora Araujo.

They came to the headquarters of the CND to incorporate into the repertoire of Dance for Parkinson’s a fragment of the version of Carmen by Johan Inger, (awarded in 2016 with the Benois de la Danse prize) by the hand of Daan Vervoort, who played the role of “Don José” in the original version of the CND and who on this occasion was the teacher who taught a fragment of this emblematic creation to facilitate the participants’ contact with professional choreographies by top-level creators.

With the support of the entire CND team, headed by its director Joaquín De Luz, and the APDCM, the activity was also coordinated and attended by the President of the Board of Directors of the Association, César Casares.

Dance for Parkinson’s is not a therapy. It is a form of Community Dance: dancing concentrates mind, body and feeling in movement; by dancing, people affected by this disease explore their relationship with their body, with space, with their friends and caregivers who attend the sessions, outside of any care setting, thus improving their quality of life.

In Madrid, Dance for Parkinson’s is a program promoted by the APDCM, in collaboration with other associations such as APARKAM, the Móstoles Parkinson’s Association, and the Aranjuez Parkinson’s Association TARAY. In addition to the value of the artistic encounter itself, this initiative underlines the importance of dancing beyond entertainment: dance and the professionals who make it possible are a source of social and individual well-being for people with Parkinson’s: “the day I dance, I feel good”.