Zahava: Exploring the shamanic way of dance

Zahava

Dance as Shamanic Ceremony:
A New Offering to the Dance Community

 

from Zahava

The most curious, loving, and courageously adventurous dancers are starting to gather at the free Intros to Dance as Shamanic Ceremony.  We start by what we are most passionate to explore in the next phase of our dancing.

I felt very disconnected from my trained body, within a dance culture that valued me for things that were not related to my soul.  My metabolism, my body structure, my willingness to follow instructions through fatigue, my willingness to compete, all gave me mobility in the ballet culture. I found myself in this culture because it was one of the few options for me as a young white American girl who wanted to dance!  I have watched the impact of this culture on my body, in my friends (many of whom have stopped dancing but have not completely healed their relationship to dance), and in the current generation of professional dancers.  This is a crucial time for transformation on the Earth and it’s showing up everywhere, including the dance world.

I remember wondering how I could love something so much, rehearse hours each day, and yet see that when the audience showed up to the performance they could not connect with us.  The new course that I am offering explores dance as a source of deep connection.  I remember how awkward my dancer friends and I used to be improvising in clubs.  It’s intimidating to move how you feel in the absence of choreography when you don’t know how you feel.  The course includes feeling our soul instincts and expressing them fully through improv. 

I remember how many of us lost our menstrual cycles as young women because we did not have the body fat to support a baby.  The course gives us the opportunity to become profoundly present to the needs and desires of our body, as our primary intuitive instrument.  The pleasure we can create in our dance sets a pretty high bar for the pleasure we create in our sexuality, our career, our homes, our spirituality, our families, and our community.

I'm offering this, not only to heal the relationship individual dancers have with dance.  It is also to create more trust, wholeness, and love, in the culture of dance training as a reflection of the values we want to live by in our society.  We can train our bodies to do so much in addition to triple pirouettes and ponches.  We can train our bodies to be the perfect instruments for our souls and to transform what is not LOVE.  Forgiveness and compassion start in the body.

Standing still has become a tremendous experience with the growing awareness of the energy system in my body and it’s relationship to the Earth, in partnership, tribe, and ancestry.  Dancing from this full place is the most enlivening, grounding, pleasurable, and purposeful way of being in “here.” 

Shamanic Ceremony is speaking an intention in a charged space such that it’s possibility becomes real to the speaker, the community present, and the universe.  Dance as Shamanic Ceremony is moving our soul inside our body with an intention and we become in that moment who we need to be for the intention to manifest in the physical world.

If you are a professional dancer or have intensively studied a dance form for the past 5 years, this class will meet you at your growing edge as a mover. Experience with improv and contact improv will enhance your journey. If you have a meditation practice, study energy awareness, are on a shamanic or tantric path, then this is your class! Come meet your tribe. All genders are welcome.

Wednesdays, 6pm-7:30 pm
Sept 21, 2011 to April 25, 2012

The Red Bean Studios

320 West 37th Street, 7th Floor

between 8th and 9th Avenues, Manhattan

For more information, click here.

Register here by Wednesday, September 14.

Contact: Zahava@LoveMakingDances.com