Where are you dancing?

“Whatever music you beat on your drum 

there is somebody who can dance to it.”

_Chinua Achebe

You may think you dance in a space defined by a floor, walls, and a ceiling. You may think that your dance takes place at a particular moment in time.

The truth is that dance takes place elsewhere. Dance has its own time and space. When we say that we ‘lose our self’ in the dance, what we are really saying, is that we are entering the special space-time created by dance. Outside of our ordinary state of linear time, beyond the confines of our physical space, dance creates a place in which there is only the dance.

We have been connecting to the dance online for the past 19 months and what really strikes me is the ongoing and loving connection we create through our dance even when we are not in the same room. There is an energetic connection that transcends space and time, made possible by the fact that we are dancing together to the same music. The computer and the screen are not in the way of our experience. We connect through sharing. Our capacity to empathise is heightened by the dance. All this can be explained scientifically…

But for now, we are dancing the magic together.

_Christos Daskalakos

Remember your Dance...

Blessed We Are

_Lyrics by Peia Luzzi

Blessed we are to dance on this ground
With the rhythm of saints to carry the sound
We hold a prayer for the Earth
For the ones yet to come
May you walk in beauty
And remember your song

When did you start dancing?

Why did you start dancing?

Dance is a passion so deep that it is almost unnameable. Dance is never a rational decision. Dance emerges when we feel a stirring deep within. This stirring is really the soul expressing itself. It becomes a beautiful expression of life itself.

This is quite natural – quite instinctual. Babies love a beat – study after study has shown how naturally infants move to rhythm. And even more interesting are studies that show how when children dance they become more affective opening up to others. The innate ability to dance demonstrates an evolutionary necessity for us to connect, with self, with the other. This is why dance is literally found in every culture and society that has lived on this planet.

When life becomes overwhelming, the body shuts down. Rigidity and lack of movement are defence mechanisms against intense negative emotions. Sadly as the body stiffens to brace itself against the world it not only defends, but also shuts out the beauty and positive side of life as well. When we are shut down, dance becomes a challenge and feels uncomfortable. But when we gently let go into the dance, we find that we can navigate, feel and transmute emotion leaving us free to connect to life with joy.

Let’s dance gently – and remember our song, as Peia’s beautiful lyrics remind us.

_Christos Daskalakos

Born to Dance!

“May you be true to yourself and dance to the beat of your own soul.”

_Gail Alexander

When I watch toddlers moving and giggling to the rhythms of music I can’t help feeling that deep down in our human psyche we are all dancers. The greatest sorrow is to witness the frozen body, the one that does not move, that cannot move because of trauma, repressive beliefs or sometimes sheer terror. It is our natural state to move, to explore and experience the world through our senses, including proprioception (the sense which informs us about the shape and location of our body in space).

Movement is located in our language. We say things like; moving forward, jumping with joy, slowing down the pace etc. This is because we make sense of the world through movement. Stuck in a dark room without that ability to move – we go crazy. We also learn through movement from the first time we reached out into the world as toddler. Most of our learning is embodied through movement. And we delight in moving through spaces, forests and water.

Dance has been around since time immemorial. And the connection of movement and dance makes it the ideal medium through which we can explore and expand our connection with the world and life around us – including relationships to self, other and the entire universe! If we can only remember and connect to what it was like to dance spontaneously, as we did as toddlers, we can access a the world of dance, full of wonder, full of fun, and full of life.

_Christos Daskalakos

Dancer's Heart

“Love softens the heart and then you live longer.”

Softening the heart is not all wishy-washy touchy-feely…. as some may presume. A soft heart is actually very powerful as it is open adaptable and can interact with the world out there. The hard heart is weak as it spends all its energies protecting and defending …. what?

The heart of the dance is soft, open and connected. In the dance we experience such range of what it means to be human through emotion, sensation, creativity and imagination. We learn to recognise these in our self as we dance. Once we embody something through the dance it is possible to empathise, or see it in others. Dance opens up these lines of connection and communication building strong and stable networks.

_Christos Daskalakos