22 Daily Express Monday, April 6, 2020
STEPPING UP: Dr Lovatt runs
a dance psychology laboratoryBy Jane Warren
P
ETER LOVATT, aka Dr Dance, is a
hip-swivelling, toe-tapping, bottom-
wiggling academic who has made it
his life’s work to study the benefits
of dance and share them with the
nation. At 55, with his wayward
greying curls, horn-rimmed glasses, waist-
coat and tie, he looks the very model of an
English eccentric, especially when he shows
you his groovy moves.
But the absolutely joyful thing about
Dr Dance and his manifesto (yes, he
has written an actual political man-
ifesto in which dance is at the
fulcrum of his policies) is that
he insists it doesn’t matter
one jot whether you can
dance or not.
Oh, and do stop worrying
what you look like when
you get on down, is his man-
tra. You will be primed with
the same onslaught of happy
hormones whether you have
two left feet or twinkle toes like
Darcey Bussell.
“We are literally born to dance,” he
booms. “Have you seen all those wonderful,
spontaneous outbursts of dance on
social media as exhausted frontline care
workers in scrubs dance together to keep
their spirits up?
“What I’ve noticed is a lot of spontaneous
dancing going on. When we are in a crisis
situation we revert back to forms of activity
that bond us and help us get through.
“Dance brings people together. We are
seeing people dancing together in an authen-
tic way, just as they did in the Second World
War. When we hit difficult times people
come back to the most natural things.
“Dancing bonds societies and makes the
individual safer within the group. People
who dance together like each other more,
feel more similar to each other, trust each
other more and show more social behaviour- that is, they are more willing to help
each other.”
And now, of course, is the perfect time
for us all to uncover and rediscover the
benefits of moving to music – whether you
do so with your family, by yourself, or using
online tools such as Zoom to dance “virtu-
ally” with others in their homes.
Dr Dance’s new book has the latest
research sitting alongside brilliant dance
“recipes” for elevating mood and boosting
our mental and physical health.
According to him, moving to a beat can
even make you look better.
“I want people to know that dance is an
amazing activity, underpinned by scientific
fact,” he enthuses.
“It’s the surprising secret to being smarter,
stronger and happier, and it also makes
people more beautiful too. We should all be
dancing more. There should be more places
to dance in public and we should mandate
dance spaces at work.
“It makes us more productive, more
connective, more creative, more prosperous,
fitter, healthier and happier.”
He pauses for breath and I wonder if
he’s about to pirouette out of his chair –
after all, this is a man who has a ballet barre
installed in his home as an essential
household item – but instead we
take a nifty quickstep through
some of the science.
Not least the fact that a
study published in the
British Medical Journal
last September found that
regular dancing led to a
20 to 30 per cent lower
risk of depression and
dementia, a 30 per cent
lower risk of colon cancer, a
20 per cent lower risk of breast
cancer, and a 20 to 35 per cent
lower risk of cardiovascular disease.
“And it also has a hugely positive effect on
our problem-solving ability,” he insists.T
HIS is something the doctor – who
trained for five years as a dancer and
appeared in professional musical
theatre before side-stepping into an aca-
demic career – has discovered through
research at his Dance Psychology Lab at the
University of Hertfordshire.
“At my research lab, where I am using
science to study the relationship between
movement and the brain, I have found that
different types of physical movements affect
our ability to think in different ways.
“There are some problems, for instance,
that have just one correct answer.
“Then there are problems with potentially
hundreds of different answers.
“These multiple-answer problems require
‘divergent’ thinking.
“In our lab experiments we found that
people who did 20 minutes of improvised
dancing became more creative in the answers
they had to divergent-thinking tasks. For
example, before dancing, participants
could generate four or five alternative
uses for common objects such as
bricks or newspapers, but after
dancing they could generate
seven or eight.” Then there is theanthropological evidence. “Dance is a fan-
tastic way of communicating,” he asserts
gleefully. “There are ancient cave paintings
of dancing. Before we had verbal language
we were communicating with our bodies.
“It’s entirely natural, it happens in all
cultures and children still do it before they
learn to speak.”
Peter is the father of two sons with his
wife, Lindsey: 22-year-old Digby is a pro-
fessional musician who plays the bass
while seven-year-old Romeo dances‘There
should be
more places to
dance in public
and we should
mandate dance
spaces at
work’CA
Is
he
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w
no
pi
wSPONTANEOUS JOY: Weary medics at Basildon Hospital lift their spirits with a bopCACACA
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nonon
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wwBOOGIE ON
DOWN TO
A BETTER
YOU WITH
DR DANCE
Want to be smarter, healthier
and happier? Meet the
academic who says all you
need to do is master some
moves. And he’s
got the evidence
to prove it...