Why dance?

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

“Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls…”

Rabindranath Tagore

Tagore’s haunting words resonate today more than ever as we live in a world that information and words have divided, deceived and fragmented. In these times I sense the urgency of dance, especially of dance traditions that still hold the wisdom of body-led intelligence and ritual, as the technology that can offer us a radically new way of being in our bodies and in our lives. I feel the transformation required is one of consciousness, and this each one of us can undertake without anybody’s permission.

I often hear women say that they do not like dancing or that they cannot dance. If this resonates with you, my invitation is to consider what kind of dancing you mean when you say that.

We think we know what dance is. It is one of those words that have morphed into many avatars without us realising the implications. Dance at its most fundamental level is the language of the body, just as a language in the general sense is verbal. Like verbal languages there are many kinds of dancing and each is significantly different from the other. We cannot assume their homogeneity just as we cannot assume that all verbal languages are homogenous.

Today we dance to music, we dance as performance, we dance as therapy, for exercise, for self-expression, as a profession and many other purposes. Many ancient traditions saw dance as the central language of a ritual manifestation of consciousness. This way of dancing is perhaps less common than the other purposes and one that is likely in decline in our times.

Dance as ritual is a particular approach in the tradition I teach. It is not a performance practice. It does not ask for mastery, competence, technical perfection or comparison. It is an intimate, personal practice (much like dancing in your shower!). Ritual dance is not a random creation—it is a sophisticated technology of consciousness transformation. One unique aspect of ritual dance is that it is body-led, which means that the dance is not mind-created but is a revealed tradition that manifests in its fullness when we learn how to let the body lead movement.

When we live in times of profound disconnection with our bodies, dance of any kind becomes a contentious domain. Often people suggest that I use another word instead of the word “dance”. This fills me with deep sadness. Because I feel that it is akin to abolishing language.

Dance is not just movement, it is movement that has the power to be a language. It has its own dynamics of time, space, weight and shape that, when understood in their fullness, allows us to manifest meaning and expression far beyond the capacity of verbal languages. In its most expansive expressions, like ritual dance, dance functions as embodied symbols that connect us across space and time, and through this awakens timelessness and fleshes the Divine. Ritual dance renders the Divine intimate.

Dance is vital for our times because it is the enduring call of our bodies even in the midst of our denial of body as the site of our lives. Where we have allowed dance to become the slave of mind-sourced paradigms of mastery and instrumentality, we also have the opportunity to dance because Nature dances. We dance because the leaves dance, and birds dance and the wind dances. Dance is the flow that joins the dots that walls of words separate, make parochial and fragment.

We need dance to flow around the walls we have built and to connect us to our bodies, to Earth and to each other.