the synchronicity of DANCE

“Dance is the tireless interpretation of life.”

_Sha Asad Rizvi

When we dance music and movement begin to synchronise in the brain through a process known as entrainment. Rhythm organises our nervous system while movement gives the rhythm form in our bodies. Through the dance our bodies respond and reshape and amplify each moment of magic bringing us into a state where thinking becomes more fluid and our perceptions more open.

In dance we are constantly exploring possibilities. Each movement hold in it the suggestion of many pathways. As our brains open to this multiplicity it encourages the development of divergent thinking. When we apply this to life our problems, issues, and narrative don’t have to have a predetermined outcome. Instead the possibility of multiple trajectories unlocks our creativity urging us on to different and enriched outcomes.

We experience this directly in Biodanza when we follow the music and allow movement to unfold naturally. Our capacity for imagination and intuition is expanded and are embodied. This is translated outside the dance in our lives as we begin to live the dance daily.

_Christos Daskalakos

dancing our way back to normal

“To understand the culture, study the dance.

To understand the dance, study the people.’

_Charles Davis

What we call “normal is often simply what we have become used to. In our modern world dance has been placed outside of ordinary life to be found for example in the theatre by specialised and trained performers. Clubs and special events are often reserved for small segments of society that comply with the right age and specialised groups. At celebrations such as weddings there’s always a divide between those that do not, and those that do dance.

This has not always been so, and is of course not universal. Among many indigenous cultures, such as the San people, trance dance is not entertainment but a collective way of restoring balance. When difficulties arise in the group, people gather, move, sing, and enter trance so that tension, conflict, and illness can be transformed together. Responsibility is shared and life is understood as a dance of relationships rather than a problem carried by one individual.

In this sense, conscious dance practices like Biodanza simply return us to something deeply human. When we move together with presence and music, the body remembers and well-being and renewal once again become a normal part of life. Perhaps the real question is not why we dance, but to wonder how we ever came to believe that dancing was unusual. The invitation is to normalise dance so that once again it becomes and integrated part of our lives.

_Christos Daskalakos

the transgression of dance

“You need chaos and frenzy in your soul to give birth to a dancing star.”

_Friedrich Nietzsche

Every act of transformation begins with a crossing. Moving beyond our comfort zone, we step beyond our known edge taking a risk to leave the familiar and enter into spaces unknown. Philosophers have described this in many ways. Georges Bataille speaks of transgression as the moment we cross a limit and enter the sacred. Friedrich Nietzsche calls it self-overcoming. Carl Jung describes it as the descent into the shadow in order to become whole. Mircea Eliade shows how every initiation requires a symbolic death before rebirth. Different languages describing the same truth: to become new, we must cross a boundary.

When we dance, we step outside the logic of usefulness, goals, and the known. We surrender to a body that can move without reason often looking irrational or even transgressive. It’s because we move from comfort and the known into the joy of simply being in the dance that we begin to feel an aliveness. The dance becomes a threshold where identity loosens and as we soften out of all expectations and judgements something older and more instinctive begins to guide us.

This is pure instinct - the instinct to live life fully. For many, this represents transgression as the norms of society, culture and our own identity are challenged, shaped, and re-formed into new possibilities. This is why dance transforms us. Not because we try to change, but because we allow ourselves to trespass beyond the narrow borders of who we think we are. In movement, we gently disobey the habits that keep us small. And in this dynamic exciting rebellion, something new is born.

_Christos Daskalakos