With this special expanded issue of the American Journal of Dance Therapy, we revel in the impulse to orient our movement onward by looking back from whence we came. Half a century ago a collection of forward-thinking women joined together, regardless of differences among them, to form an alliance designed to stabilize and enlarge upon opportunities for healing through the interactions inherent in dancing. On the occasion of this golden anniversary of the American Dance Therapy Association (ADTA), we both salute the efforts of all of those who have contributed to our developing profession to date, and aim to shed some light on the pathway ahead for the ADTA’s next half century and beyond.

This celebratory issue, designed to match the growing variety within dance/movement therapy (DMT) itself, is comprised of writing on the subject in various formats and from quite diverse perspectives. In the pages that follow our readership has the chance to encounter an unusual range: from original research and rich analyses capable of establishing new ways of understanding and documenting the field; to narratives of contemporary practice in a quickly changing world; to a multi-page timeline, printed at the back of the issue, which highlights some of the more consequential events in the ADTA’s history to date, year by year. There are also distinct occasions for listening in on some of the prominent voices in DMT discuss its development during the ADTA’s first five decades, and recommend directions for its future.

The issue begins with two such arrangements of voices. First, eight second-generation dance/movement therapists offer personal accounts of the work of Marian Chace, Blanche Evan, Liljan Espenak, Alma Hawkins, Trudi Schoop, and Mary Whitehouse. Reflecting on mentorships with the DMT profession’s first innovators, this group of Embodied Protégés came together for a presentation at the ADTA’s 50th annual conference last year. The entire panel—Jane Cathcart, Sharon Chaiklin, Joan Chodorow, Eleanor DiPalma, Nana Koch, Marcia Leventhal, Iris Rifkin-Gainer, and Elissa Queyquep White—readily agreed to the journal’s invitation to expand here upon their recollections.

Next, this issue lends a microphone to all of the ADTA’s 15 presidents—beginning with Marian Chace and ending with today’s Jody Wager. Each is represented, sharing in her own words pivotal moments from her tenure. The journal invited those 12 women still among us to have served in that ADTA leadership role to reflect on their roots in the field, preparations for the presidency, and the overall arc of their time in office. Statements gathered from published records and archival materials enable the publication of posthumous reflections, as well, to represent the tenures of those former presidents now deceased.

The three articles that follow elaborate on quite different perspectives on DMT history. Julie Miller, Linda Aaron Cort, and Elissa White share a chronicle of DMT’s professionalization, specifically through close examination of the ADTA’s establishment through time of specialized DMT credentials and the procedures to support them. Two longtime educators then recount the development of DMT approaches that have attracted wide interest in the field and helped shape their respective training programs. Antioch University New England’s Susan Loman provides an appraisal of DMT’s inheritance from Judith Kestenberg, whose groundbreaking work with mothers and their children continues to inspire and inform developmental approaches to DMT more broadly. Appearing next, Christine Caldwell’s article, The Moving Cycle: A Second Generation Dance/Movement Therapy Form, is an account of her creation of an innovative variant of DMT, which she has refined while on faculty at Naropa University.

A curated collection of six essays by invited experts—Cynthia Berrol, Christine Caldwell with Lucy Leighton, Meg Chang, Robyn Flaum Cruz, Sherry Goodill, and Christine Hopkins—discuss matters relevant to DMT history in the U.S. In this special section, collectively entitled, The ADTA’s First Half Century, the authors examine aspects of the social, cultural, political, economic, and scientific environment for the DMT profession’s development. Reinforcing the authors’ findings, an introductory editorial highlights pivotal events in the U.S. during this same time period, contextualizing those at the ADTA’s founding, in 1966, with reference to recent historical landmarks and relevant public discourse as of the publication of this issue, in 2016.

Moving forward, the wealth of today’s research and analytical writing relevant to the future of DMT is well represented by the four articles that come next in the issue. Likely to spur both intensive discussion and further advances in research, Jessica Acolin’s even-handed literature-based study, The MindBody Connection in Dance/Movement Therapy: Theory and Empirical Support, dissects 12 assumptions made about DMT vis-à-vis the mind–body continuum. The author effectively applies grounded theory methodology in examining each of these notions in relation to pertinent research completed to date. Next, dance/movement therapist Rebecca Houghton collaborates with Beatrice Beebe, a leader in the field of both mother-infant research and video microanalysis, to examine a specific segment of a DMT session with an adolescent with an autism spectrum disorder. Their article advances an innovative methodology that may significantly enhance DMT research and practice for decades to come.

Given DMT’s dissemination in recent decades, such that the field is now represented on every inhabited continent, refining DMT practitioners’ cultural competence is growing increasingly critical. Kyung Soo Ko’s phenomenological investigation into the lived experience of East Asian students in DMT training programs in the U.S. offers an in-depth look at such cross-cultural experience. Kyung Soo Ko’s findings contribute meaningfully in an area where, in the absence of thoughtful and systematic research, faulty assumptions too often have guided communication across cultures.

Of course, in an increasingly digital world it is evident that advances in technology are shaping DMT’s future as well. Both the final research article and the first of the two narratives that follow it focus on technological approaches to meeting some of the field’s longer term challenges—in terms of educating the public about DMT and its value within changing societies, and educating the next generation of dance/movement therapists to inhabit this ever more rapidly evolving world. Expanding upon their leadership in raising awareness about the ADTA and DMT more broadly, Lora Wilson Mau and Angie Giordano-Adams examine the role of social media, finding in these new methods of communicating innovative paradigms for continuing “reciprocity” and connection. Similarly, Nancy Beardall and her colleagues in the DMT training program at Lesley University describe educational delivery through a new “hybrid, low-residency model.” The narrative’s authors elaborate on their aspiration to build a training program that allows for the benefits of long-distance instruction without undermining the intimacy of human connectedness and interaction that is at the heart of the DMT project.

Closing out the articles in this issue, Natasha Goldstein-Levitas’ lovely personal narrative of utilizing sensory stimulation techniques in her DMT groups with seniors harkens back to a somewhat less technologically sophisticated era. Taking a moment with her to reflect on movement experiences at the end of the lifecycle, we are perhaps reminded that in the DMT profession, as in so much of human experience, reflecting on where we have come from is entirely germane to planning where we are to go. Let the DMT circle be unbroken as we forge ahead.