Dancing in the Dark

Posted by Verity on December 18, 2023 in Dame designate, Health, Living today, Medical, society | 5 comments

We haven’t done a dame designate in ages, and now along comes one whose current career embodies the hope in dark times that we are more than ever in need of this Christmas.

Meet Aude Michon, founder of Elles Dansent, an organisation dedicated to bringing dance to cancer patients. She started studying music and dance at the age of seven, and at the age of fifteen won first prize at Lorraine’s Conservatoire. All set for a career in the arts, you would have thought, except her family had firm ideas about what constituted a proper job, and hoofing clearly didn’t fit the bill.

Michon knuckled down and went into the law, practising for thirteen years before picking up dance again. She doesn’t regret those years: ’I loved that work; in the end it’s all about human relationships and our journey through life.’

She left the law to become a professional dancer in 2011, and two years later formed Elles Dansent. Now she works in many hospitals and health centres, including France’s prestigious Gustav-Roussy hospital in Villejuif, Europe’s most prestigious cancer hospital.

Each week she visits the hospital dressed in a different costume. Sometimes she will just dance at the foot of a patient’s bed, sometimes – where possible – she will dance with the patient.

Deftly supported by two nursing assistants, who make sure she doesn’t get tangled up in her lines, Marie mirrors Michon’s movements as the full-throated cellos of Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals ring out through the ward. Afterwards, Marie marvels at how much this unexpected interlude in the middle of her treatment has meant to her: the sense of freedom and ease after all the pain and restriction.

Michon goes through the wards and rooms with her portable sound system, ready to dance anything at a moment’s notice, depending on what the patient or their friends or family suggest. Some participants dance seated, other swing their legs out of bed to tap along, others who are too frail to move just hold her hand as she dances. Not surprisingly, the odd patient will resist the idea, saying it’s a hospital and not a night club – and that’s fine too. But even those who don’t participate actively look forward to Wednesday afternoons and the blast of gaiety Michon brings. Nurses, too welcome the opportunity to dance with their patients.

Professor of digestive oncology Michel Ducreux is a staunch supporter of Michon’s approach, claiming that those living in the orbit of cancer, whether as professionals or patients, need a chance to breathe, to lighten up every now and again.

Even so, tears are often not far away. What else can Michon do but cry when she finds out that the patient she danced a tango with a few days previously has since died? The departure of long-standing staff, burnt out by the emotional and physical demands of their work, is also a source of sadness.

Expressing improbable responses to anything from dog fouling to the death of democracy ‘through the medium of dance’ has become something of a punch line, but Michon’s innovative practice shows that in the case of cancer it can be more powerful than we suppose.