In Memoriam: Norma G. Canner, 1918 – 2012

Professor Emerita, ADTR, Supervisor Foundation Training,
Honorary Member IAVMT

“I used to think that only special people had talent and the need to explore their creative feelings. I didn’t know that a large group of people could dance together and feel as one or that you could dance alone and still feel part of a group…. When Barbara (Mettler) said that everybody had talent and everybody was creative, she just turned my mind around, upside down. She taught me a huge lesson that literally changed my life and my idea and conception of who people were and the creative power in each human being, and it was all in how it was presented.” (Norma, from the film “A Time to Dance: The Life and Work of Norma Canner” BTI Films, 1998)

Norma came to creative dance in the 1940’s from the competitive world of the New York theatre where she had been an actress. Her experience there was tempered by her involvement in the left-wing plays of the 1930’s where she added to her ability to be fully in the moment, in a highly sensitized and disciplined way, by learning what it meant to build a community of shared experience through work and relationships based on principles of mutual respect and support. From Mettler she learned the art of creative body movement: a whole vocabulary of natural movement and a way of working improvisationally within a specific structure or problem: a dance focusing on hands, for example, in which, as her teacher would say, “You move the way you want to, according to your feelings, discovering for yourself your own form of expression.” Both the movement vocabulary and the improvisational style were key to Norma’s way of working in the evolving field of Dance Therapy in particular and the Expressive Therapies in general.

When, in the 1950’s, Norma’s husband moved the family from Boston, MA to Toledo, Ohio, Mettler suggested she could teach there. Although Norma had never thought of herself as a teacher, she offered a course for children at the local Y and – having learned her lesson – said on a TV program that “Anyone can dance.” Confronted in her first class with a child with cerebral palsy and full leg braces, she found a way to include her through dances built around body parts the child could move. This led Norma to work in hospitals where she encouraged children to move and be creative, focusing on what they could, rather than what they couldn’t do. When she began to give workshops, people would ask, “Can you work with deaf children, or blind, or retarded children, and she would answer, “I don’t know, but I could try,” and she did.

Norma and her family returned to Boston in the 1960s just at the time the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health was establishing a pilot pre-kindergarten program for children with disabilities. She was hired by Director Louis Klebanoff because, as he said, “We were looking for people who knew early childhood, not retarded, and who would approach these children as children rather than patients.”

His principal, Dorothy Tucker, pointed out that at that time people weren’t so interested in helping children, especially children with disabilities, experience their lives, but rather in molding them according to preconceived ideas. Klebanoff and Tucker knew that teachers concentrated on instructing children to learn; they were looking for someone who would help them “experience” by claiming what they did, and thought, and felt, as their own. As Tucker said, “You can’t own something if it’s pushed on you or if you don’t have to use yourself to do it. The way Norma worked, anything the child did, the child owned.”

Soon there were over a hundred such schools in Massachusetts which became the model for what is now known as Early Intervention. During this time, Norma taught in many different college and university programs around Boston which led her to write her book, “….and a time to dance,” exploring how creative dance can enrich the lives of children with special needs. She also worked with children in poor neighborhoods in the North and in the American South in Head Start Programs.

“The making of something,” working towards the expression of health and wholeness through the creative impulse and dealing with feelings head-on, in the moment, became hallmarks of Norma’s work. Not only was there no failure in creative dance; the ability both to express and to safely contain volatile, even violent feelings within these improvisational structures caused Dr.William C. Freeman, ADTR, Movement Educator and Associate Member of the IAVMT, to remark that “If people, including children with disabilities are allowed to express themselves fully, within safe structures, they won’t need to act out later on, and many crises and hours of therapy could be prevented.”

The ability Norma had to sense what these children were feeling carried over into her work with adults. In 1974, she was invited to begin the Dance Therapy department at Lesley University where she taught for fourteen years while also expanding her work through programs in Israel, Switzerland and various parts of America. Beginning in the 1980’s, she travelled annually to Kansas where she worked with Dr. Freeman at the Kansas State Department of Education and Accessible Arts, Inc. teaching teachers, paraprofessionals and parents to use the Expressive Arts with children and youth with disabilities.

From the mid-1980’s into the early 21st. century, she maintained a private practice with adults, combining dance and movement with imagery, enactment, sound and voice to encourage expression and integration of the self. Norma considered sound, especially human sound, to be one of the basic materials of dance, “the kinaesthetic made audible,” and adored the singing voice in all its forms. After being introduced to the new discipline of Voice Movement Therapy in 1994 by Anne Brownell, Norma became supervisor and visiting teacher on the Foundation Training in Voice Movement Therapy: The Voice Unchained. The Norma G. Canner Foundation for Voice Movement Therapy was established in her honor.

One of the ways Norma worked with adults was by connecting them back to the child within through creative movement which rekindled non-verbal memories and provided an opportunity to access the creative spontaneity of childhood. “The body has a memory and if you’re working in therapy and you move, it will just come out and you can work with it and it begins to heal. You can’t defend that place the way you can in verbal therapy.” But you could transform it. Norma would initiate and guide a person through deep life issues, and other life issues, using movement and sound to access memories locked in the body either prior to the acquisition of language or because the nature of an experience had made words inaccessible or inadequate, and then she would encourage you to express and shape them in new and creative ways which would help change how you felt about them.

And Norma was always playful. “Play is the way children learn and it’s a thing adults have forgotten and that gives us our spirit and wonderment. We need to play all our lives and for children, it’s their way of learning to be social creatures.” It is also a way of re-socializing people who have been held back in their development by childhood issues. It could be said that art is the highest form of play, and Norma had the ability to access all those dark and scary places, the monsters really, and help you transform them by re-experiencing and then expressing them as characters, songs, and dances: a part of oneself, but not the only part. I came to work with Norma because I knew I had somehow to connect my mind to my body, to my whole feeling self, and that changed my life.

Barbara Mettler would say, “Let the movements grow out of each other, with your whole self in it, and the more your mind, your body, your spirit are integrated in it, the more meaning it will have, the more alive it will be.” Norma said, “That’s why I love dance and creative movement so much, because it employs the whole self, not just part of the self. If we don’t know something with our whole selves, we don’t really know it. We need to reconnect with that childlike sense of discovery, because ultimately that’s how we learn and grow. Movement takes us to deep places and it’s vital to create a sense of community and trust to contain them.”

And so it is passed on, this gift of doing, of making beauty: in creating a dance; in rebuilding a life; in learning to play. Norma’s fifty-years-plus commitment to Dance Therapy and the Expressive Arts was documented in the film “A Time to Dance: The Life and Work of Norma Canner,” by Ian Brownell and Webb Wilcoxen, as a testament to the power of the Expressive Therapies.

“To say Norma will be sorely missed, both by those who knew her for years and those who came into contact with her only briefly, is an understatement. Her compassion, respect for each individual, reverence for nature, artistry and ability to reach out to those most cut off from social interaction will never be forgotten.” (Dennis Livingston, composer, writer and Norma’s son-in-law.)

“I think the power and the magic of Norma has to do with her ability to see the spirit and the love inside of someone and connect it with her own energy. We can help nurture that spirit in others by the medicine of who we are. The greatest therapeutic medicine is another human being.” (Stan Strickland, jazz musician, teacher, dancer).

The theatre honed Norma’s feeling for character and motivation; Mettler’s creative movement gave her the essential tools for her work; and she combined them with her own faith and belief in what she called “an empathetic love for the client.” As Mettler was an artist of aesthetic individual and communal dance, so Norma was an artist of human relationships who exemplified the Zuni quote which hung in Mettler’s studio:”We dance for ourselves and for the good of the city.” The “city” – all of us in our various places around the world whose lives Norma touched – feel an emptiness, an absence, because a wonderful, unforgettable, greatly loving person has “moved over.” At the same time, we are aware of a richness which remains in what she taught us and the gift her work and her presence brought. Let us remember her when we dance.

– Anne Brownell, Feb, 23, 2012

A Time to Dance: The Life and Work of Norma Canner can be purchased from www.btifilms.com/atimetodance.html

Contributions:
Check or money order (USA) can be made payable to the Norma G. Canner Foundation for Voice Movement Therapy. In the memo section, please be sure to write “Donation” and mail to the Norma G. Canner Foundation for Voice Movement Therapy, c/o The Marion Institute, 202 Spring Street, Marion, MA 02738.