The invisibility of dance
Photo Barbie Robinson
Today I was practising with one of the women in my individual program who experienced a significant revelation during the week. This was connected to the practice of weighted presence which is a central aspect of body-led Divine Feminine dance I teach. To my surprise I heard her attribute this to another workshop (not dance) she did for a few hours even though we had been practising the dance inquiry for a few weeks!
This invisibility of dance is something I have noticed occasionally in my work with women. Even though they spend weeks in their dance inquiry, it is as if the role of dance in the revelations that emerge for them is invisible to them.
Recently I have begun to invite women to consider how their dance inquiry may have a role to play in this transformation. Because I feel that I owe it to them to invite attention to the possibility that their revelation emerges from their own dancing body and not from an external source.
Over centuries of linear, mind-led knowledge systems and spiritual traditions, we have lost the attending to the multi-dimensional nature of reality.
In body-led dance inquiry there is a practice called chatushpada which literally means four-footed but which also signals four dimensions of awareness or consciousness. In practice this means holding at least four parts in any encounter with reality which removes a simplistic linear interpretation.
For example, the traditional healing paradigm is chatushpada—the physician, the medicine, the person who is sick and the attendant. The inclusion of the attendant is at the heart of chatushpada’s invitation. In some healing approaches, the attendant or messenger receives the treatment and the sick person is healed especially where the person is unable to travel to the physician. Therefore the attendant can play an important role in the healing even though our hierarchical mind will consider that role of the lowest order of the four dimensions. The invitation of chatushpada is that all four dimensions are equal without any hierarchy.
Experiencing reality as a multi dimensional encounter in each moment is to match its fullness and truth. When we reduce reality to linear cause-effect paradigms, we may miss the site where the action is actually happening. And dance is easy to miss because we have centuries of dismissal of dance as frivolous and superfluous. To consider dance a radical spiritual inquiry requires recognising the quiet attendant in the room, waiting patiently and working her alchemy even when she is overlooked.
As a dancer dedicated to dance as the inquiry, I also owe it to dance to invite attending to the attendant. Dance may well hold the seeds of living life celebrating its gift of embodied and sensation-drenched beauty and abundance—something that is urgently needed in our times.
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