What is archetypal dance?

Archetypal dance is the dance that was practiced by many ancient cultures in different parts of the world, where there was a coming together of ritual and ceremony, dance, and often deities or archetypes. The aim of many of these traditions was the transformation of consciousness.

A simple way of looking at it is to think about the coming together of opposites or polarities. It returns us to that multi dimensionality where all of these things that we think are opposites coexist. This is very much body led intelligence. And that is why dance was very central to most of these ritual and archetypal traditions. And through these poetic invocations of deities or archetypes, they allowed us to express this bringing together the space where everything co exists.

For example, there is a day at called Rudra, who is an ascetic and sensual, who is fire and water, and who is a healer as well as a destroyer. So in bringing all of these things together, for the mind, it's like it's a story and there is a detachment. But when we do the dance, and these dance traditions are not just made up, they are they are really revealed traditions, and they are highly intelligent and sophisticated. And they allow us to express these opposition's and these polarities, and they what happens is, they take us to something other, it is not one plus one equals two, but it is actually something other, it brings another perception, a transformed consciousness. And what I find both when I do the dance, and when I teach the dance is that it really opens up reality in a completely different way. And an enjoyment of plurality rather than feeling threatened by difference or threatened by many different things that may have different opinions or different knowledge systems, we actually begin to enjoy this plurality. Just as when you look out into nature, we enjoy how nature is diverse, and plural. And that is true of our consciousness as well. And that is what an archetypal dance allows us to enjoy and to express.