In Tampa, U.S. Army veteran Traci Davis found a new path after a brutal breast cancer fight by joining dance movement therapy at VA Tampa with therapist Brittni Cleland, where movement became both medicine and mirror. The sessions helped Davis cope with the lingering physical effects of chemo and radiation and rebuild the confidence she feared she’d lost. This article follows Davis’s recovery, the methods Cleland uses, and how dance gave a community of survivors a way to move forward in Tampa.
Traci Davis served during Operation Desert Storm from 1989 to 1993 and got a rare breast cancer diagnosis in October 2019, which meant 12 weeks of chemotherapy followed by seven weeks of radiation. The treatment left lasting physical aftershocks that include numbness and altered taste, and those changes shaped how she approached recovery. Coming into VA Tampa’s program, she carried the weight of that trauma and the longing to dance again.
Brittni Cleland, a dance movement therapist at VA Tampa, watches more than steps when veterans enter the room; she watches posture, rhythm, and the tiny ways people tell their stories with motion. “We use movement as an intervention tool, but also as an assessment tool, so I’m assessing her from the moment that she walks into the room,” Cleland said. For Cleland, therapy is about translating those glimpses into exercises that rebuild everyday strength.
The work is practical as much as it is expressive, starting with mirroring and slowly expanding into tasks that mimic daily activities, like bending and rising without pain. These movements are scaffolding — small, repeatable actions that, over time, change how a body remembers itself. For Davis, the aim was simple and stubborn: to regain the ability to move freely and confidently in the world.
Physically, the toll is that I have zero feeling in my hands and feet. My tongue is still numb. Food still tastes different,” Davis said. Those exact words underline the lingering, invisible costs of cancer treatment, and they explain why a program that treats the body as an instrument of healing matters so much. Dance therapy didn’t promise a cure for neuropathy, but it offered a route back to agency.
Emotionally, Davis wanted “Relief, I was hoping to just offload a lot of frustration, a lot of anger, a lot of anxiety, just a way of escape,” Davis said. She describes the sessions as slow alchemy; change didn’t come overnight, but the repetition of movement, the listening in the room, and the safe permission to fail helped reshape how she saw herself. The therapy accepts that identity after illness is something you have to build, not recover like a lost object.
Cleland frames the work with goals that extend beyond the studio — better balance, steadier gait, the ability to kneel or lift without fear — and she layers creative tasks to deepen that functional progress. “She [Davis] wants to live a long, healthy life, right? She wants to get down on the ground and back up,” Cleland said. By folding dance into rehab, Cleland says patients find a visceral connection between therapy and the life they want to lead.
Confidence is at the center of progress; reclaiming the rhythm of daily movement often unlocks a deeper sense of possibility. “This is the thing, Brittni has helped me with my confidence,” Davis said. She learned to trust that the ground is steady even when sensation is not, and that trust let her stage a routine for other breast cancer survivors that she described as a “total release.”
Davis, who has loved dance her whole life, spoke about how movement gives her a sense of freedom. “I just want to get out here and move and be free and just fly and just enjoy life. I love to dance. I love to move my body,” Davis said. In a room at VA Tampa, with a therapist who reads motion like language and fellow survivors watching, she found a place to reconnect with joy, not just survival.
