the story of conscious dance​

 

dancing with the gods

The story of Conscious Dance goes all the way back to the birth of human creativity and culture. Cave art, as early as 40.000 years ago, is seen as a sign of a blossoming creative consciousness of our ancestors. Their art features animals, hunting scenes, and symbols lost in time. Next to these depictions, we frequently, or sometimes only, find drawings of people dancing or involved in a ritual. We'll probably never know why our early ancestors painted these dancing scenes, but we can look at tribes that still live intimately with nature. Anthropologists estimate that 92% of small-scale societies practice(d) some sort of religious trance, most often through ecstatic group rituals involving dance and music. Dance, trance, music and ritual are part and parcel of tribal life. 

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When settlements started to grow into cities and empires, dance still played an important role. In ancient Greece, Dionysus was the god of wine and ecstasy and his widespread cult had people dancing in ecstasy in forests, on mountains and in the first theater performances. Dance was not some fancy add-on in the old and widespread Dionysus worship. Dance was the medium through which you experienced Dionysus directly, or better, through which the essence of Dionysus could enter the worshiper. The roots of the word enthusiasm remind us of this. Enthusiasm comes from the Greek enthousiasmos, from enthous ‘possessed by a god’ (based on theos ‘god’). 

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The space to dance freely

We may feel that dance is important in our personal lives, but on a societal level it is basically deemed inessential. What changed? Did dance loose its function? Does it no longer serve a real purpose in our contemporary societies, other than entertainment, exercise, or art? This seems to be the general idea. Dance once played an important role in connecting tribes, healing and in practicing religion, but dance lost its role as societies matured, found other ways to connect, and people outgrew their superstitions. 

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But is this really what happened? Did the wild, ecstatic dances in moonlit forests simply fade out over time? Or, were they clamped down, much alike the intense policing of illegal raves? It is worth reflecting why it is illegal, or at least heavily regulated, in our societies to gather in a forest or abandoned warehouse to dance. News articles tell us that illegal raves are dangerous: drugs, damage to the environment, anti-social behavior, and so on. In other words, it is for our own good that these illicit gatherings are stopped. What then draws people to these hazardous events? Surely some thrill seeking, but if you listen, most dancers will mention things along the lines of  'Peace, Love, Unity, and Respect' (PLUR), the rave credo since the 1990's. In these marginal free zones people find a rare mix of wild self-expression and deep communion with others, the larger world, and beyond. Burning man was/is such a temporary free zone, and its 10 principles powerfully capture the values that can develop in such a free space. 

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Western civilization is increasingly catered to the individual, and it is surprisingly hard to gather as a large group. Think of the countless apartment blocks with thousands of households, each with the privacy of their homes, but with almost no shared communal spaces, like a shared BBQ place. You can still find such spaces in old buildings or in the Nordic countries, where buildings might have a shared washing facility or even a communal sauna. This individualistic architecture is more deliberate than you might expect, as Adam Curtis shows in his eye-opening documentary 'The Century of the Self'. Separated individuals buy their own BBQ's, instead of sharing, which keeps the economy growing. Individuals also focus on their small scale concerns, like paying the rent, instead of uniting collectively to change an unfair system. Dance can offer an experience that differs from our dominant story of separation, as writer Charles Eisenstein calls it. We can experience how we are all part of what we sometimes call 'the big body' in conscious dance, or what anthropologists might call communitas. From the 16th till the 17th century carnivals were increasingly forbidden in Europe, precisely because of because of the spirit of community and connection. dancing festivities could spill over in a revolt, 

 

In a similar vein, we have lost the commons. The commons is land not owned by anyone, and accessible to everyone. These commons have all but disappeared, and practically all land is either privately or publicly owned. One really has to find a loophole, like driving far into the desert, to create a temporary communal free zone. The places where we do meet en masse, like a stadium or concert hall, often reduce us to a spectator, not a participant of the whole. The freedom to move, in other words, is closely tied to freedom we have to play with the rules of interaction. Only then can we have a collective dance between chaos and order, that gives rise to a rich, organic and ever shifting complexity. 

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Even as individuals we are less free than most people think. Author Graham Hancock speaks of a war on consciousness in his banned (!) Ted-Talk. To quote him: 'We live in a society that will send us to prison if we make use of time-honored sacred plants to explore our own consciousness. Yet surely the exploration and expansion of the miracle of our consciousness is the essence of what it is to be human? By demonizing and persecuting whole areas of consciousness we may be denying ourselves the next vital step in our own evolution.' Why is it that most of us involuntary shiver at the word 'drugs', while we drink our coffee, eat our sugary products, and sip our wine without a second thought? Why are synthesized, trademarked drugs advertised everywhere, when we get in trouble for collecting psycho-active mushrooms growing nearby. Why is one of the most damaging and addictive drugs, alcohol, legal, while other drugs that bring about feelings of connection and deep insight are illegal? Is this all really for our own good? Truth is, our system stresses an alert, problem-solving consciousness, as Hancock calls it, so we keep doing our jobs and answer that email. In addition, we have to be a bit anxious and needy, so we keep on consuming and keep on delegating our power to people who maintain the status quo. Conscious Dance is part of an ecstatic culture that disrupts this narrow bandwidth of consciousness. 

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In the absence of rules and regulations people won't go feral. That is the myth, which keeps on getting reinforced by our media that neglect the solidarity and altruism and highlight the incidents. In reality, we often create more conscious communities that bring out the best in ourselves (see Rutger Bregman's Humankind). Dance is often an essential part of that. From Rainbow gatherings to the Occupy movement; people dance a lot. This is no coincidence. Dance is the enactment and embodiment of values like PLUR. Through free-from-dances, like conscious dance, we can radically express ourselves, and are simultaneously moved by the same rhythms vibrating our bodies; the same rise and fall of the dancing journey; and the shared emotions sweeping through the group. Importantly, it also works the other way around: put a group of strangers, willing to dance, in a room and after a few hours people will feel free, vitalized and connected. Of course, some guidance helps, just like a sensitive, dynamic musical journey. This is what our ancestors knew. This is, I believe, why they painted dancers so frequently. Dance brings out a better version of ourselves. 

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dangerous dances

There is now scientific consensus that those first cave paintings likely were the first trip reports of shamans going into trance, using dance and/or psycho-active plants. From the onset, dance has been a way to explore consciousness. 

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If dance brings out the best in humans then why is it so marginal our societies? How can something so vital, be so neglected? This is no accident, but the result of a smear campaign, lasting centuries, if not millennia. And although this campaign against dance was never completely successful, we all have internalized the anti-dance messages to some extent. Young children love to move, and dance comes natural as a form of expression. Somewhere down the line, however, we learn to inhibit this joy of movement. We are trained to sit still and distrust our bodily impulses. As a result, many adults can only dance once they release their inhibitions with some alcohol. 

 

Dance is dangerous, precisely because it liberates and equalizes. These are undesirable outcomes if you want to maintain a social pecking order. ​Author Barbara Ehrenreich details in her book 'Dancing in the Streets' how dance was severely censured and banned by those in power, especially the church. This already started in classical Greece, where the old cult of Dionysus with its prominent role for female priestesses (Maenads) and mixed participation of all social classes was not always welcomed. During Roman times, the worship of Dionysus and many similar cults went underground to prevent the intermittent persecution, giving rise to different mystery schools. Christianity was one of these cults, until it became the state religion with vested interests. Early Christianity was influenced by the Dionysus cult, explaining why Jesus turned water into wine. However, when it rose to power the church systematically removed all Dionysian practices from their services. All forms of participating in the divine were discouraged or banned. Pews were installed to keep worshipers from moving and dancing; speaking in tongues and joyful singing banned; and no more women 'tossing their freely flowing hair' in rapture. It was all about obedience and control. Dance became an official sin in the 13th century, like most things associated with the feminine and with ecstatic practices. Even the image of the devil himself took on the form of the Greek God Pan, the nature god that often overlapped with Dionysus. Dance was only permitted when stripped of its wildness and sacredness. It was permitted as high art (ballet), class specific social dances, or as lowly entertainment. 

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Ehrenreich chronicles the early church's systematic attempts to remove the Dionysian elements from their services - dancing, singing, speaking in tongues, the tossing of freely flowing hair. Free expression was discouraged; pews were installed to compel worshippers to control themselves, and their possessed brethren were duly evicted on to the streets. Dance manias erupted at various points in the 13th and 14th centuries and dance itself was deemed the devil's work. The church dissociated itself from its own former joyous demeanour, offering instead ritual, solemnity, high aesthetics. Ehrenreich traces the sudden explosion of carnivals and popular festivals in the 15th century to the suppression in the churches of the more exuberant forms of worship, and makes a very striking point: the separation of the divine connection from carnival made it a merely hedonistic exercise, essentially devoid of meaning.

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History is written by the victors, or more specifically, by the dominators. Domination refers to a certain kind of social order, an order based on on hierarchy and control, division between men and women, and a high prevalence of violence and war. Almost all societies today are based on domination, according to Riane Eisler, the system scientist who coined the term. Eisler describes how the domination model came to the fore around 7000 years ago when invading nomadic tribes, such as the Yamnaya (Indo-Europeans) started conquering Europe and the Indian subcontinent, giving rise to large scale empires. It was either to dominate or to be dominated. Before this shift, most social systems were based on a partnership model, centered around caring connections. Dance & music played a crucial role as they enabled tribe members to connect and attune emotionally. Furthermore, through dance they could enter the spirit world and find guidance and healing. For the dominators dance was dangerous. Dancing freely and spontaneously disrupts social order, and those at the bottom might get the wrong idea that they are equal to the ones at the top. Ecstatic and trance dance also gave people direct access to the divine, which undercut the whole legitimacy of the institutionalized religions and their hierarchies. 

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The transition from partnership to domination did not happen everywhere simultaneously and often there was a mix of both models. In Europe specifically there was a strong shift toward domination and a severe crackdown on everything ecstatic. With colonialism, the domination model reached all corners of the world, and Ehrenreich describes how an African expression for a converted Christian was 'he who has given up dancing.' 

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the loss of the sacred

The domination model not only describes how we relate to other human beings, but also how we relate to other life forms and, ultimately, ourselves. Social order tends to dehumanize the people below, which makes it easier to abuse them and legitimize the superior position. Likewise, our conquest of nature can only happen by reducing nature to merely 'natural resources' and biological machines. for a long time science has been instrumental in furthering the domination rationale. It separated the world into neat, little boxes; separating the material from the immaterial, mind from body, emotion from ratio. Denying your impulses to move, to show that you are moved, to feel 

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Through the course of our history our bodies language, the voice of nature, and the know-how of getting into ecstasy and traveling through trance have been silenced. It took centuries of repression by those in power-  the church, kings, and later much of mainstream science - to alienate ourselves from the living world and install a view on the world that is mechanical and detached. This tragedy is repeated within our own lifetimes in which we learn to sit still and value a so-called objective view of life, making us outsiders to our own lives.

 

Conscious dance revival

Conscious dance and other ecstatic practices have been banned, but never eradicated. It went underground in the many mystic cults of the Roman empire. In the middle ages, dance broke out in the streets during Europe's dancing plagues, with thousands of people compulsively dancing for days. Later, the church allowed these outbreaks as carnival. Ecstatic dance also managed to survive when tribes around the world infused and disguised their practices as the Christian faith of their conquerors. And in the West, conscious dance experienced a revival around the turn of the 20th century when pioneers as Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, Mary Starks Whitehouse, Gabrielle Roth, and many others, refined the pathways back into our bodies, and back into the living fabric that we are part of. 

One cause for this rarity is that

 

 

Perhaps, justified in some cases, but how free are we then? Do we have the space to make our own, mature decisions - and mistakes - without an overbearing father state? We once had the commons: land and resources not owned by anyone, and accessible to everyone. These commons have all but disappeared, and practically all land is either privately or publicly owned: we always have to . Moreover, our inner space is also controlled as we cannot alter our state of consciousness, using drugs, as we deem fit. Why is plant medicine, like mushrooms, forbidden, while trademarked drugs are advertised everywhere? Why is one of the most damaging and addictive drugs, alcohol, legal, while other drugs that bring about feelings of connection and deep insight are illegal? Is this all really for our own good?