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interspiritualsacreddance.com

From ancient roots to modern expressions
of the Divine

a few words about the first Festival: All Life is Movement ~ All Movement is Dance ~
All Life is Sacred ~ All Life is Sacred Dance

By Tannis Hugill, with... contributions from Sacred Dancers

Ancient peoples worldwide honoured life as a harmonious dancing whole. The proliferating complexity of modern western culture has drifted away from this knowledge for reasons too many to name, or even understand, contributing to the crises of survival that face us today.

Movement, dance, voice, and breathing techniques were once integral components of early ritual, along with theatre, music, and the visual arts. The gods dance the cosmos alive in many cultures’ creation stories. Images of humans dancing appeared in the first mists of human culture. Cliff and rock paintings as old as 29,000 years are found in Africa and Europe with images of what is considered to be ritual dance.

Other examples of dance as spiritual practice include Dionysian ecstatic dances of the Greeks, Tibetan Buddhist dances celebrating the New Year, East Indian dances of Hindu epics, and First Nations’ Sun dances. Shamans danced to mediate energies of spirit for healing humans and our relationship to the earth. Communities danced to pray, to celebrate, to mourn, prepare for war, to hunt, and ensure a bountiful harvest.

Unfortunately the body has become discounted, even maligned in European and North American culture. Dance and all the arts have become secularized since the Renaissance. And though we have been cut off from our ancestral legacy, today there is a growing hunger to explore our relationship to our bodies.