From left: MaryTherese Escueta and Amanda Lindamood receive coaching from fellow dance student Christina Coppel while rehearsing for the premiere of a work she choreographed for her senior project. Photo by Mike Sands.
When Christina Coppel (CWR ’17) was a junior in high school, she spent hours each day training at an elite dance studio in Columbus, Ohio. She’d been dancing since she was two-and-a-half—first ballet, then jazz, then modern. If everything had gone according to plan, all her hard work would eventually have given her a shot at joining a professional company.
But halfway through her senior year, it became clear that her years of dance had taken a physical toll. “Every time I danced, I was in pain,” Coppel remembers. “My mind and my heart wanted to dance, but my body just couldn’t.”
She began to trade the hours she’d previously spent in the studio with time in physical therapy sessions. At first, she was devastated and discouraged. Then her innate curiosity rescued her.
The more Coppel got to know her physical therapists, the more questions she had about their work. Was there such a thing as a physical therapy major in college, or had they gone to a special school? Coppel had always been interested in dance science, a field that studies dancers in order to promote their wellness and performance and reduce injury. But now, for the first time, she began to consider the possibility of becoming a physical therapist for dancers.
“There were a lot of things telling me that there was something better for me out there than having a career as a professional dancer,” Coppel says.
She decided to attend Case Western Reserve University, where she could pursue a bachelor of arts degree in dance while also exploring other areas of study. Four years later, she has achieved her goals by completing a double major in dance and psychology and a minor in sports medicine.
Along the way, Coppel interned with a renowned physical therapist for dancers in New York City, presented at an international dance medicine conference in Hong Kong and choreographed a performance for her senior capstone project. These experiences, she says, truly did prepare her for “something better.”
“Had I gone straight into dancing, I wouldn’t have had the broad perspective that I do now,” Coppel explains. “Case Western Reserve has been a place where I could take the lead in my own education and run with it.”
Coppel’s teachers in the Department of Dance were ideally suited to help her realize her ambitions. Professor Karen Potter, the department chair, and Professor Gary Galbraith, artistic director of the Mather Dance Ensemble, are the founders of CWRU’s Dancer Wellness Program, a pioneering effort to call attention to dancers’ health and open lines of communication between dancers, instructors and medical professionals. Since its creation in 2000, the program has achieved international recognition, with several universities in this country and abroad calling on Potter and Galbraith for advice on launching similar initiatives.
“A dancer wellness program is not unlike sports medicine for the performing arts,” Galbraith says. All dance students at Case Western Reserve participate. They take classes in kinesiology and biomechanics, receive annual physical screenings and are assessed individually by a medical professional who can help them recover from injury or address areas of weakness. The program dovetailed perfectly with Coppel’s academic and artistic interests.
From left: Christina Coppel says that she took the initiative in shaping her education with support from Professor Karen Potter, chair of the Department of Dance. Photo by Mike Sands.
Last summer, with assistance from Potter and Galbraith, Coppel obtained an eight-week internship with Westside Dance Physical Therapy, a practice that serves dancers from New York City Ballet (NYCB). Its founder, Marika Molnar, is a pioneer in her own right: In 1980, she became the first physical therapist to work for a major professional ballet company.
When Coppel observed one of Molnar’s sessions at NYCB, she learned a valuable lesson about communicating with dancers, who she knows are typically tight-lipped when it comes to pain.
“I had the opportunity to watch Marika work with dancers right before a performance, and I listened to the way she spoke to them,” Coppel recalls. “She asked the dancers to be very specific about their pain. Were they stiff? Did something feel warm? Was it prickly? If something was pinching, she would try one thing, and if something felt warm, she would try something else. It wasn’t a one-sided conversation, and there was a lot of compromise.”
Before her internship began, Coppel also spoke to Potter and Galbraith about participating in the 2016 conference of the International Association for Dance Medicine & Sciences (IADMS), which would be held in Hong Kong that year. She wanted to develop a poster presentation and sought feedback about her ideas.
“I knew I wanted to combine dance, psychology and physical therapy, and Karen and Gary encouraged me to do just that,” she explains. “They told me that it would be great to bring more attention to the psychological component of physical therapy for dancers, as there is a growing interest among dancers and in IADMS. So I took that and ran with it.”
Coppel began looking for studies examining the relationship between a physical therapist’s way of communicating with dancers and the success of the dancers’ rehabilitation. After finding only one book that even touched on the subject, she submitted a proposal calling for more research.
Her hypothesis, inspired in part by Molnar’s approach, was that physical therapists could likely improve the overall rehabilitation experience for dancers by tailoring their language to dancers’ needs, goals and ways of thinking. For example, instead of asking a weight-conscious dancer to “eat more,” a physical therapist might advise her to add more protein and calcium to her diet. And instead of recommending “strength training”—a term that dancers might associate with lifting weights and developing bulky muscles—a physical therapist might suggest Pilates or other body-weight training exercises that increase strength without increasing bulk.
“I wasn’t surprised by Christina’s focus,” Potter says. “She was able to tie together all of her interests into one project.”
IADMS accepted Coppel’s proposal, and she received funding to travel to the conference from dance department donors and the university’s SOURCE office (Support of Undergraduate Research and Creative Endeavors).
Her poster presentation was one of 50 at the Hong Kong event, which she attended with Potter and Galbraith. She confesses that the experience was a little intimidating. “I was the only undergraduate who was presenting,” she recalls, “and I hadn’t actually done a research study.” Still, her presentation was well received. “A lot of people stopped by and said that modifying language for the dancer wasn’t something they’d considered. And that was the reaction I was looking for.”
After Coppel returned to Cleveland, she made a second presentation, this time at Case Western Reserve’s Intersections: SOURCE Symposium and Poster Session, where she earned second place in the Humanities Poster Competition.
“Presenting at SOURCE gave me an opportunity to show people that, yes, there is a dance major at Case Western Reserve, and that the dance department isn’t just performance, but that there’s also a science side,” she says.
In the midst of all her other activities, Coppel did not neglect her dance studies. In fact, she performed every semester of her college career until the last, when she stepped out of the spotlight to choreograph an original piece for five dancers. Cascading Drift was based on a solo work she had created and premiered in 2015. Coppel was responsible for every aspect of the production, including costumes and lighting, and she coached the dancers—MaryTherese Escueta, Mia Gorczyca, Amanda Lindamood, Lauren Pearman and Abigail Yaffe—during weeks of rehearsals this spring.
Now that she has graduated, Coppel will take a gap year to work, save some money and assess her options. Though she may apply to doctoral programs in physical therapy for Fall 2018, she is also considering spending the early years of her career in a psychology-related field, and then transitioning to physical therapy.
Whatever her future path may be, Coppel expects to apply the skills and knowledge she acquired as a Case Western Reserve undergraduate. “I’ve learned to network and to take control of my own experiences,” she says. “I’ve lived in a new place, and I’ve learned a lot about myself along the way. It hasn’t been an easy road, but it’s been one that’s taught me how to communicate and how to show people who I am through the things I’m passionate about.”