The body you dance in is the only one you'll ever have.
Physical therapy built around the specific way dancers move. So you can keep performing at the level you've worked for.
Dance asks specific things. Your care should too.
Dance makes cumulative, specific demands on a body. The hip turnout built over years of training. The loading patterns of grande allegro, competition season, eight shows a week. The neurological precision that performance-level technique requires. A good PT can help a dancer feel better. But a practitioner whose entire clinical preparation was built around dance? We can help a dancer keep performing -- through this season, through a professional career, through the long arc of a body that has chosen this art form.
Maine Dance Medicine was built to fill that gap. Physical therapy built around the specific way dancers move. Built for this, from the ground up, by a practitioner who spent over a decade working at the highest levels of professional dance and theater, and who brought that standard to southern Maine.
How We Work Together
Orthopedic Rehabilitation
An injury in a dancer's body isn't just an injury. It's a disruption to training, to timing, to a season, to a career trajectory that took years to build. Treatment here starts by understanding what you're trying to get back to -- not just what hurts. Your first visit is a 90-minute evaluation: full assessment, diagnosis, and a treatment plan built around your specific goals and your timeline. Every follow-up is a full 60 minutes, one-on-one. No clock-watching.
Individual Screenings
Most injuries don't happen suddenly. They are the result of patterns: loading compensations, technique adaptations, movement habits, that have been building for months or years. A dance-specific screen identifies where those patterns are before they become injuries. Objective data on how your body is moving: the strengths, the vulnerabilities, and what they mean for your training and your long-term career. Screenings are the foundation of any smart conditioning program. Ideal before an intensive, at the start of a rehearsal season, or as an annual baseline for serious dancers at any level.
Onsite Workshops
Workshops bring the clinical framework directly to your studio. When dancers understand how their bodies work, teachers can train them smarter, and parents know what to watch for -- the whole environment changes.
Workshop topics include: What to do when something hurts: triage for dancers and parents. Injury prevention and load management, Pointe readiness and pointe prep, Joint health and strength for specific technique demands.
All workshops are tailored to your studio's population and season.
Laura Hohm PT, DPT, CFMT
Dr. Laura Hohm built Maine Dance Medicine around a single conviction: serious dancers in this region deserve the same standard of care as the professional performers she spent over a decade treating in New York. She has been a Company Physical Therapist for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. She worked across more than 100 Broadway productions. She treated company dancers from American Ballet Theatre, The Royal Ballet, and Paul Taylor Dance. She brought that standard to southern Maine.
As Maine's only Certified Functional Manual Therapist -- a credential held by fewer than 300 practitioners in the country -- Dr. Hohm treats the whole movement system, not just the site of pain. It is why she starts with the foot when the complaint is the hip. It is why she catches what others miss, and why her patients often recover more completely.
Before bringing her practice to Maine, Dr. Hohm served as a Company Physical Therapist for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, touring internationally and providing on-site care for Ailey II and the Ailey School.
She then joined PhysioArts -- the premier performing arts PT clinic in New York City -- where she served more than 100 productions over a decade, including Broadway (Hamilton, Wicked, The Book of Mormon, Chicago, Aladdin), Radio City Music Hall's Christmas Spectacular, and Film/TV (The Greatest Showman, Smash).
She has treated concert dancers from American Ballet Theatre, The Royal Ballet, Paul Taylor Dance, Complexions, and Cedar Lake, and has provided preventive care for pre-professional programs including Ellison Ballet and the Gelsey Kirkland Ballet Academy.
Dr. Hohm has lectured at the International Association for Dance Medicine and Science and published in peer-reviewed orthopedic journals on dance rehabilitation.
She is available for individual patients, studio partnerships, and institutional consulting across the greater Portland area and the NH Seacoast.