"If you don't do your dance, who will?" -- Gabrielle Roth
My working definition of dance meditation is: a spiritual movement practice that frees the soul, i.e. frees you to be yourself. My model for a dance meditation is Gabrielle Roth's Wave meditation.
You may not be familiar with the Wave. For the basic idea of the Wave see "A Review of THE WAVE". For a deeper look see two books by Gabrielle Roth: "Maps to Ecstacy" and "Sweat Your Tears". For the actual experience of the Wave, get hold of the tape "The Wave" and try it. Or go to one of Gabrielle Roth's workshops, if you can.
In Gabrielle Roth's tape "The Wave", she uses her own music to guide us through what she feels are the five basic rhythms of life: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. You can certainly use her music, but you could also use whatever music moves you to these rhythms. (Aside: Or you could use no music at all.) I've danced the Wave to songs from my own collection many times.
Here's a sequence that appeals to me:
| flowing,
feminine |
"Watermark" (Enya)
"She Rises Like A Dolphin" (Kate Wolf) |
| staccato,
masculine |
"Green Onions" (Booker T & The M.G.'s)
"When The Going Gets Tough" (Billy Ocean) |
| chaos | "Why You Wanna Play Me Out" (Trisha Covington)
"Lambada" (Kaoma) |
| lyrical | "The Power of Love" (Celine Dion)
"A Whole New World" (Regina Belle and Peabo Bryson) |
| stillness | "Song for Lea" (Herbie Mann)
"Ecstacy of Peace" (Brother Charles) |
Personally, I find it valuable to sometimes dance the Wave to Gabrielle Roth's music and sometime to my own collection.
Here's a few of the things I've come on while selecting music for my meditations plus some of my thoughts on them, which are still evolving.
Many of the songs I consider most lyrical are Blues related, e.g.
Do these songs fit the lyrical? They fit my usual use of the word lyrical. And they seem to fit Gabrielle Roth's view: they take flight and they involve resolution and maturing. In any case they seem to be a real part of life and belong somewhere.
So far, occasionally adding them to the sequence between chaos and lyrical seems to work well. I'm less comfortable simply using them as lyrical. I'm still engaging with this.
There are very few songs that I think of as staccato and none that are favorites. I tend to think of staccato as "abrupt, disjoint" which is just one of its definitions. I associate masculine more with driving than staccato. But "Green Onions", one of of my favorite songs that I think of as driving and masculine, actually fits perfectly into another definition of staccato, i.e., "marked by short clear-cut playing or singing of tones or cords". Maybe I just need to change my way of thinking of staccato. [The two definitions above are from Meriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, tenth edition.]
Some songs seem to fit more than one rhythm, e.g.:
I'm not sure what the significance of this is or how to use these songs. For now I simply use them where they feel right.
The music you select, the insights you have from process of selecting music and the meditations you have will likely be quite different from mine. The point of all of the above is to sugggest (by example) the possibility of creating your own dance meditations as an adventure in which you'll become more connected with yourself and the music you love.
© Copyright 2001 George Woolley
for more info about Gabrielle Roth, see Raven Recording page about Gabrielle Roth.
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