Dances of Plenitude

“He who cannot dance will say, the drum is bad.”

_Ashanti Proverb

Often we approach personal development and other life challenges as if we need to acquire something from outside of us to change. Biodanza flips this around and proposes that everything we ever need is already inside of us and that our dances become a way of recognition rather than acquisition. A powerful example of this is recognising our own power through the Dance of the Tiger.

The Vivencia creates a space in which we move beyond our habitual ways of being and encounter different possibilities in us. This includes stories of lack or judgements that prompt us to seek to change ourselves from the outside in. Creative dances open up the space in which we connect with new possibilities including the way we perceive ourselves.

Each Vivencia offers us an opportunity to experience and embody many more dimensions of ourselves. Dances of vitality can connect us with our own inner strength. Our capacity to give and receive love can become evident through dances of affective interaction with another and the group. In Biodanza our dances become more than just physical movement. Through embodying feeling they become the avenues through which our ever emerging identities expand beyond any limitations. The more we explore and expand our dances, the more emergent we become so that we stop seeing ourselves as a finished object but rather as a fluid, dynamic, and ever changing stream of life itself.

_Christos Daskalakos

SOCIAL DANCE

“The dance is a poem of which each movement is a word.”

_Mata Hari

Biodanza is different from many other social interactions in this world. Often this difference exists as a gap between what we are experiencing inside and who we show to the world. Sometimes by necessity this becomes a negative experience as who we present is determined by expectations, fear or being defensive. And sometimes quite innocently we are simply wanting to impress or project a particular persona.

Biodanza offers us a beautiful invitation. This is to enter the dance without any sense of performance or concerns about doing the right movements. The music, movement and intentions for each exercise or dance is carefully constructed to create conditions of affective trust in which we are free to let our guard down. In these dances we surrender any social roles and projections and meet each other in our naked humanity. Through the dances we start to discover a form of social dancing that is full of meaning and the vitality of life.

In this respect our dances in Biodanza are empowering. We encounter ourselves. We drop habits, expectations, fear, or looking good so that our experiences feel honest and liberating. In this sense Biodanza becomes the space where our dances become the open heart in which we meet each and value each other, and more importantly ourselves.

_Christos Daskalakos