Morgan Dubay learns to combine dance and psychology for healing
Morgan Dubay is a double major in dance and psychology with a minor in applied behavior analysis. This combination of different passions has helped her see how the arts can be therapeutic and transformative, and she choreographed a recent piece dedicated to mental health advocacy.
Life in the dance program
Dubay discovered her love for dance at a “Mommy and Me” class when she was just 18 months old. When she was 8, Dubay visited a family friend who was attending Salve Regina and saw the dance company perform.
“We saw the show and I looked at my mom and said, ‘I really want to go to Salve. This is the place for me,’” she said. “And ever since it was the only place ever on my radar. Once they got the dance major, that’s when I really decided that Salve Regina was a no-brainer.”
Dubay said that Salve Regina’s dance major is unique for many reasons. The curriculum is focused on jazz as the foundation for movement, and the program acknowledges and honors jazz as a historically Black American art form best understood through awareness of one’s own identity and culture.
“Our program addresses the five critical concerns of mercy throughout its curriculum, as we are consistently working through a human rights lens,” Dubay said. “As dancers, we are listening to experiences of Black American artists to think critically about racial inequality in jazz dance.”
The program is also deeply centered around feelings expressed from the inside out. “It’s a participation in the purest form of self-expression, so feeling inside and out means we take our emotions that can be good or bad and let our outward movement express what’s going on inside,” she said.
Dubay enjoys participating in Extensions Dance Company, an audition-based, pre-professional concert dance ensemble that performs in jazz, contemporary and tap styles. “The program allows space for all dancers and artists to collaborate in a supportive environment,” she said. “I believe that the Salve dance program is unlike any other.”
Combining psychology and dance
Dubay is interested in child development and how artistic expression is a means to make important healing connections within the mind and body.
As a first-year student, she became a service advocate working with Hasbro Children’s Hospital, the pediatric division of Rhode Island Hospital. She helps in any way she can, and her love for child psychology and helping children process their emotions has grown as she’s continued this work.
“For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to be a dance movement therapist,” Dubay said. “In middle school, I began to see an art therapist who showed me that the arts can heal. I have personally felt the benefits of dancing through life’s challenges and roadblocks. Whether it’s basic movement or grooves, movement heals.”
In 2022, Dubay began choregraphing a contemporary piece that shows how creative expression can help process mental health issues. “Round and Round” takes inspiration from watching a family member struggle with schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder.
“I will never understand the battle that is schizophrenia and dissociative identity disorder, so I told this story through the lens of an 8-year-old Morgan who just wanted answers for her family member’s actions,” Dubay said. “I have two dancers telling their own individual stories, and one dancer manipulating and preventing any connection or relationship between the two.”
Looking to the future
Dubay hopes to pursue Salve Regina’s master’s degree program in clinical counseling and wants to utilize what she has learned in the psychology and dance programs to work with pediatric patients in crisis.
“I believe that complete mental wellness is accomplished when we take a step back and look at the whole person,” she said. “The whole person includes the environment and guardians when discussing children and adolescents.”
Article written with supplemental reporting by student writer Amanda Graves ’23
