Tomorrow I travel to Oslo to attend the Norwegian National Dance Conference 2026 where I will be running two Dance with Me workshops, alongside giving a keynote and taking part in a panel discussion. It feels like a good moment to pause, reflect, and set down, clearly and personally, what the Dance with Me project is, why it exists, and what it is becoming.
Dr Peter Lovatt — Doctor Dance — is a dance psychologist exploring how movement shapes the way we think, feel, connect, and perform. Through projects like Dance with Me, he brings dancers from different disciplines into collaboration and conversation, using the STEP Framework (Social, Thinking, Emotion, Physical) to make the psychology of dance visible and usable. These ideas also sit at the heart of his work as a keynote speaker, where movement is used to help teams rethink creativity, confidence, and capability in high-pressure environments. If this perspective resonates, you can book a Doctor Dance keynote to explore these ideas with your organisation.
What is Dance with Me?
Dance with Me is a movement-based psychology project that uses dance as a catalyst for collaboration and conversation.
At its core, the project is about bringing professionally trained or experienced dancers together, often from different disciplines, and inviting them into a structured process of shared movement and guided psychological reflection. Each collaboration begins with dancing and develops through conversation. What emerges at the end is not predefined, except for one essential rule: it must result in something new, something that would not have existed without that collaboration.
The STEP Framework
The conversations at the heart of Dance with Me are guided by the STEP Framework, which explores dance from four interlinked perspectives:
Social: how we dance with, for, and alongside others
Thinking: how cognition, creativity, memory, and decision-making shape movement
Emotion: how feeling and movement are bound together
Physical: how bodies change, adapt, and express across time
This framework allows dancers to articulate not just what they do, but why they move the way they do—and how that has been shaped by their history, culture, and context.
Why I Started Dance with Me
The Dance with Me project began in October 2025, prompted by a very personal observation.
As an older dancer, I noticed two things about the way I dance:
- I keep doing the same movements.
- Almost everything else is changing.
Across my life, the social aspect of dancing has shifted—from clubs, classes, and performances to dancing alone in my kitchen or suddenly with large groups of people in unexpected places. The thinking aspect has changed too: I can no longer pick up choreography as quickly as I once could, but I am far more creative than I used to be.
The emotional aspect has not changed at all. I still feel a powerful emotional connection between my moving body and my inner world.
The physical aspect has certainly changed. At 61, my body cannot do many of the things it could do at 16—but that is not a problem. Most of the time.
I started Dance with Me for two reasons:
to broaden my own movement repertoire by dancing with people from different disciplines, and to create a structured way of having meaningful conversations about the psychology of dancing.
The Dance with Me Process
Stage 1: Share Your Dance Personality
The process begins by finding another dancer to collaborate with and sharing what I call your dance personality.
Your dance personality is a short phrase of movement that expresses who you are as a dancer at this point in your life. This is a two-way exchange: you show your movement, and you invite the other person to dance with you in that style.
Stage 2: STEP Framework Discussion
This stage focuses explicitly on the psychology of dance.
Together, we explore the social, thinking, emotional, and physical aspects of our dance personalities and our wider engagement with dance. We also map our dancer’s lifeline, reflecting on how key experiences across our lives have shaped the way we move today.
It is always a shared process. Through these conversations, we learn not only about each other, but about the dance cultures we each inhabit.
Stage 3: Merge and Motif
We then return to movement.
Here we begin to combine our dance personalities, merging different approaches and creating a shared movement motif. This often requires adaptation—listening physically as well as verbally—so that both dancers are fully accommodated.
Stages 2 and 3 are rarely linear. We often cycle between discussion and movement across several sessions.
Stage 4: Create Something New
What emerges at the end is entirely up to the collaborators.
The only requirement is that it must be something new—something neither person would have created alone, outside of the collaboration.
What Has Emerged So Far
Each collaboration has taken a different form:
Video Recording: Jodie and I merged our movement styles, set the work to a poem, and are preparing to film the piece in an outdoor urban setting.
Knowledge Creation: Gemma and I danced together and then carried out a deep thematic exploration of what emerged. Seeing how dance operates psychologically across a lifetime has been genuinely fascinating.
Public Event: Laura and I share a passion for public engagement, so we are creating a full evening of participatory dance and conversation, inspired by a 1970s theme.
Performance: Anastasia and I have been developing a variation of a Foxtrot, which we plan to costume and perform.
These are just a few examples of what Dance with Me can generate. There are many more possibilities.
Moving Forward
As I head to Oslo to run Dance with Me workshops, I am increasingly convinced that this project sits at a productive intersection: between movement and meaning, between practice and reflection, and between who we have been as dancers and who we are becoming.
If you would like to join the Dance with Me project as a collaborator, or if you would simply like to know more about it, please get in touch.
