Existential Creativity and Dance

“Dance is a way of thinking. It helps us develop divergent thinking – the ability to explore multiple solutions to a problem rather than seeking a single, fixed answer.”

— Peter Lovatt –Dance Psychologist

Existential creativity is about making meaning and shaping life. Often we resign ourselves to thinking we are not creative because creativity seems to belong to artists, musicians, and poets. Works of art certainly reflect life, but Rolando Toro identifies one work of art beyond all others. He calls this Ars Magna, the Great Art, and he invites us to dance into creativity not as a way of making “things”, to create this “GREAT ART”, that is life itself.

Dance leads us to the Art of Living. In Biodanza, when we dance, we enter a space where there are no fixed answers, no right or wrong moves — only the experience of the here-and-now that we call Vivencia. In these spaces, something begins to unfold, not as ideas from the mind but as a living process that invites us to think with the body and open an awareness beyond logic and rational control.

Existential creativity arises when we recognise that life itself is a creative process. Peter Lovatt’s research into dance and psychology highlights dance as a way of activating divergent thinking. This is the kind of thinking that expands rather than narrows, that explores many possibilities rather than seeking a single solution. Divergent thinking reflects life not as a fixed predetermined story but a living choreography of existence where everything is fluid, unpredictable, and possible.

_Christos Daskalakos