We recently connected with Lisa Linger and have shared our conversation below.
Lisa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.
My educational background is in psychology, biology, and mental health counseling. I earned my Master’s of Science in Couples and Family Counseling about ten years ago and worked as a counselor in a variety of settings from hospitals to the foster care system. Throughout these experiences, I realized a lot about the complexities of working in a large system including the wide chasms and robust hurdles that people have to navigate in order to receive the services these systems are supposed to be providing. I found it mentally exhausting to live with the dissonance of knowing my desire was to help people improve upon their lives and seeing a pathway forward, yet not being able to affect as much change as we had hoped for because of rigid policies and politics. For these reasons and more, I experienced a level of burnout working in these large systems.
Around the peak of feeling the weight of these systemic gaps, I moved to Roanoke, VA for my partner’s job which gave me an opportunity to breathe and process through my career path. Though I had chosen a career in mental health, I had also had extensive training as a dancer within pre-professional ballet companies throughout NC as a child and teenager. The university I went to did not have a dance program, but I continued training in any way I could nonetheless. However, throughout my master’s program and beyond, I had quit dancing all together to solely focus on being a mental health counselor.
After the move to Roanoke, in my state of burnout and trying to regain perspective of my career, my body craved dancing again. So before even applying for jobs in this new city, I sought out ballet classes. I knew that whatever this next phase of life would hold, I would need to be moving in some artistic way for my own mental health.
Throughout those first few months, I was also praying for doors to open that were meant for me and doors to close that were not meant for me. I had had an inkling of a vision around utilizing dance and movement as a means for teaching people about mental health, but I hadn’t seriously danced for almost 6 years, so I kept it hidden in a crevice in my mind. Instead, I started applying for counseling jobs, still praying for clarity.
In the same week that I was receiving emails from counseling agencies saying their positions were already filled, a neighbor saw my husband sitting on our porch and asked if he knew of any artists she could interview for our neighborhood magazine. Had I been sitting there, I would have said that we had just moved there and didn’t know anyone. But I wasn’t sitting there, so my kind husband told her about me.
She called me the next day, and I reluctantly set up an interview feeling a bit of imposter’s syndrome since I had only JUST started taking ballet classes again and didn’t quite feel like an artist worth interviewing for a magazine. Nevertheless, we met and I told her about my history getting to train with some of the best dance instructors North Carolina had to offer.
While we were closing the interview, she stopped me and said she felt compelled to ask me one more thing. She’s also a painter and at the time was working on a series for an upcoming gallery opening called “The Symbolism of Doorways”. She had had a vision of a dancer choreographing and performing two pieces around a doorway installation to depict the process of change including the risks, the retreat back to the familiar, the trepidation of moving forward, and the difficulties of maintaining change.
My jaw was on the floor. At no point in the interview had I mentioned my vision of one day utilizing dance to teach about mental health. At no point had I mentioned my prayers of doors opening and closing. Yet here it was – an opportunity to take the risk and see if I could utilize what I knew about mental health and create and perform dance pieces that could impact people in deeply profound ways. I agreed to do it.
A few months later, I performed two pieces titled “Doorways of Change” for a room of about 50 people at her opening show utilizing props and choreography that represented what I knew as a counselor would be important to display in order to tell a story – my story – around the rollercoaster ride of making positive change in one’s life. Afterwards, the response from the audience was beyond what I had ever imagined. People approached me to tell me how they saw themselves in the dance pieces, how it made them process through their next steps and their own trepidations, and how they felt an increase in motivation to make the changes they needed to make.
Literally and figuratively, that was the door that opened to this next chapter in my life – the door I needed to take the risk of seeing this vision come to fruition. I spent the next two months devoting all of my time to planting the seeds, growing the relationships, and seeking mentorship around what became Mental Health in Motion.
Fast forward 6.5 years and we are now an LLC, part dance company, part mental health education agency, often pairing both together to create dance productions that aim to educate and inspire about mental and social health related topics. We have 12 dancers and have had the honor to present all across Virginia and North Carolina within schools, Universities, hospital conferences, art galleries, mental health agencies, fitness centers, assisted living facilities, and churches. We have weekly creative movement classes for adults, and a host of collaborative partners who share in this vision of bettering our communities through the arts.
And no matter where we go and how we grow, I will always be thankful for the door that opened when my neighbor met my husband on the porch and for the courage to take the risk and walk through it.
Lisa, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
As a counselor working within large systems, I noticed one of the biggest gaps was the lack of general mental health education. Now a days we have so many more online resources, but back then, most of the resources existed in journal articles, books, and pamphlets. These are fine and necessary for educating people, but they’re not really enough. Mental health is complex. The way each person thinks and feels is so nuanced depending on their genetic makeup, brain chemistry, personalities, lived experiences, culture, upbringing, etc. that it is nearly impossible to fully understand by just reading a text. And in this way mental health, that is mental illness and mental wellness, becomes invisible and challenging to grasp.
However, by taking various components of mental and social health which are largely complex and invisible and turning them into a visual through use of choreography and dance stories, audiences can actually see and thus feel the information. It becomes an experience that they embed within their being because now they have a schema, a tangible visual they can mentally reach back to when faced with the situation in real life. By seeing, feeling, and experiencing the dance stories, audiences develop not just a head knowledge, but a heart knowledge leading to more self-awareness and empathy for others.
This is what we create at Mental Health in Motion. Through a highly collaborative process with the dancers, fellow mental health professionals, and advocates with lived experiences, we are able to create entire educational experiences including a small contextual speaking portion, a large dance production, and some sort of reflection section for the audience either through Q&A or small group discussions.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
Beyond the mission of Mental Health in Motion to provide mental health education, advocacy, and awareness through creative means, there are several underlying beliefs and goals that drive our work:
1. People over products.
In our hyperproductive society, it can be so easy to get lost in creating the end product that we forget about the wellbeing of the people working to make it happen. This happens a lot in the dance world as our bodies are the art, so to create a certain artistic product means utilizing our bodies in a variety of ways that may go against what’s actually best for it in a given day. I’ve also seen some choreographers desire a certain emotional exposure from dancers to create a more “authentic experience” for the audience which can leave dancers more raw than what is beneficial for their mental health. As the director, my goal is to create dance stories that are impactful for our audiences, but not at the risk of the physical and mental health of our dancers. Rest and boundaries when needed are vital aspects of our company culture, as is recognizing that each dancer is a whole person with outside stressors, mental health needs, and life changes that could impact their ability and desire to complete a project. We’ve created a wealth of flexibility, a means for open communication, and no repercussions for taking time off for a season while still being upfront with expectations and maintaining professional quality of work.
2. Don’t do it about us without us.
I had heard this early on in my creative journey with Mental Health in Motion, and it hit a deep chord. So many of the topics we broach are not a part of the lived experiences of our dancers. When that happens, it is a vital part of our choreographic process to make sure that we’re including the voices and influence of the advocates with lived experiences and the professionals working in the field with evident credit to their work and opportunities to be in the educational production. Sometimes, the topic is broad enough to be a part of our company members’ personal stories in which case we do a lot of group processing to co-develop the overall message. As a whole, our goal is not be a voice for the voiceless, as I believe everyone has a voice. We are simply translators into a different language, a visual language, that may allow audiences to understand certain aspects of the topics more deeply.
Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?
Most people who know me know that I love learning. There has never been and will never be a point where I feel like I’ve got it down, whatever “it” is. There is always more to know, especially as our world continues to evolve. Ask me this question in ten years and I may have a very different answer, but for now, my list of influential resources that have impacted my work include:
1. Mentorly – a virtual resource for artists to pair with a professional in the field to get feedback and mentorship. I have had two mentors through mentorly who I met with a couple of times in the beginning of my journey who were incredibly helpful in the launch process. I don’t think I would have taken some of the steps I took without their wisdom and guidance.
2. “Dare to Lead” by Brene Brown. (Disclaimer – In general , I hesitate in naming highly acclaimed authors and “influencers” because I don’t believe in idolizing people, as everyone is flawed. We don’t have to agree with certain people’s stances on everything to recognize that a particular project or product they created was helpful.) I find myself going back to this book over and over again because of the research and conclusions laid out by Brene and her team about vulnerability and leadership. I have taken several phrases from this book as personal mottos such as “clear is kind” and “soft front, strong back” and continue to use some of the tools laid out during challenging interpersonal situations.
3. Americans for the Arts – They have a series of webinars, research articles, and toolkits on their website that have been incredibly helpful for navigating the intersection between the arts and advocacy and doing so in a way that is evidence-based and in touch with current literature around the impact of the arts across the US.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mentalhealthinmotion.org
- Instagram: @mentalhealthinmotiondanceco
- Facebook: /MHIMdanceco
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mentalhealthinmotion
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8XHJzQutZyfCKRzDUp0CfA
Image Credits
Ashley Fellers