STEPHEN LEWIS finds out about the healing power of dance.

THE idea that dance is good for you isn't that new. Any form of exercise that gets the heart pumping and the blood racing through the veins has got to be a plus in today's world of couch potatoes and hi-tech office slaves. Whether it's a game of squash, a brisk workout at the gym or line-dancing at the village hall probably makes no odds.

York dance teacher Lesley Ann Eden, though, is taking the idea of dance as a healing art to new heights.

In a series of new classes beginning at Lowfield School on Thursday evening, Lesley - a former Evening Press health and exercise columnist - aims to introduce people to Power Moves, a series of dance moves designed to tap into and release the body's natural energy.

Her dance, she says, is not a cure-all: but it will help release pent-up stresses and frustrations, and make people feel better in themselves.

"I'm not saying it will heal people," she says, sitting in the sun-drenched front room of her home in South Bank. "What I am saying is that it will bring about a sense of well-being and a balance within the body that modern medicine doesn't take account of."

Lesley, founder and principal of the York School of Dance and Drama - she was this year presented with a prestigious national Kidscape Award in a ceremony at the Millennium Dome for her work with children - has developed her ideas on healing gradually over the years through teaching dance and experimenting with new ideas in choreography.

"At first it was dance for dance's sake," she admits, "and the quest to find new and exciting ways of making children interested in dance. But gradually it evolved. Continually, people were saying 'we feel really good after that' or 'I came to the class feeling really down and depressed and now I feel really good'."

Lesley began to hone the moves, developing them into what is virtually a system. "You're creating moves as a choreographer, then finding out where those moves take you," she explains. "I was listening to something inside me that was taking me wherever it took me, just being open to that and not putting any blocks in the way."

The result is a series of Power Moves - dance-based moves and postures that go by names such as 'Amassing the Energy' and 'Protection'. Underlying them is the idea that the body contains a mass of different energies, often all pulling in different directions. By harnessing and harmonising them through her 'moves', she believes it is possible to create a feeling of well-being and balance that is too often missing from our lives. It gives the body, she says, a feeling of being 'at ease' with itself.

She demonstrates a move, flowing gracefully into position with arms extended above her head. "It makes you feel good," she says, "so I tried to think, what is it doing?" The answer, she says, is that as well as providing healthy exercise it is helping to bring the body's internal energies into harmony and 'creating almost a hypnotic state of balance and harmony'. In today's stressed-out world, she says, that's got to be good.

Lesley's ideas, she admits, were influenced by Eastern thinking - she lived for a time in India as a young woman. But they were developed entirely on her own - which made it all the more of a surprise to learn that the shamans of Ancient Mexico used dance for healing in much the same way.

That she discovered only in the last few months while developing her own system for a PhD with Middlesex University.

"It was a shock," she admitted: "but also fascinating and exciting. To find my moves, or some of them, were the same as those that were the basis of shamanistic healing: that was wonderful."

u Lesley's Power Move classes for adults begin at Lowfield School on Thursday, 6.30pm, price £4 a lesson.