Russia 26 Sept 2014
Dance was originally a celebration of life, a way of communicating with the world, the gods, nature, and one’s community. This was the meaning of dance – connection, human encounter and celebration. And this is the message of biodanza. We are all dancing our lives. When we are walking down the street we are dancing our life. When we are cradling a baby we are doing a dance of love. When we see a friend and give him a hug we are also dancing. We are moving all the time. And when our movements find meaning they become a dance. This applies to mechanical movements as well. A depressed worried person is also doing a dance. She’s dancing her sadness and hopelessness. There are many ways of dancing. Biodanza helps us to dance joy, expression, and the encounter with oneself, others and the totality. It enables reconnection through claiming back the body. We don’t have a body. We are the body. I am my body. I am not a brain that possesses a body. If that was the case then my brain would pull me this way and my body to the opposite direction. That is dissociation. We want integration. I am my body. The way I move, the way I look and communicate, that is me. My soul is in my body. My body is animated. If we have life we have a lot of soul in the body. We need to recover our vitality and our joyful smiles.
Babies only know two affects. The joy of something pleasurable and the sadness that makes them cry because of something they don’t like. I often observe how my 8-month old son reacts to the world. As he hasn’t yet developed language he expresses himself through his body. That’s what we do in biodanza. We return to our early pre-verbal experience. Before humans spoke they already moved and communicated through a symbolic language that didn’t need words. So it’s a communication. We have an instinctual capacity to express ourselves.
Biodanza connects us to our instincts, e.g. the gregarious instinct of being in a group. We are mammals. Love was first of all a mammalian instinct. We have a primitive reptilian brain that makes us fight or flight, keep our territory and seek food. We also have a middle brain, the mammalian brain that makes us look after our children and learn to love through parenting. When we were babies we depended on someone as much as we depended on the air we breathed. And this person wanted to give us all of his or her love and protection. From here love arose and then found a symbolic language. Eventually we started to write romantic songs, books, poems and movies. So love is an instinct that arises when all conditions are present. And all of this can be danced.
Dance is not about having an expression of aesthetic beauty. Dance is about expressing life, love, your desires, your passions, hopes, and about transforming your life. Dance makes you whole. When you dance everything is there, your feelings, emotions, and desires are there. And you discover who you are. Not in a cognitive way, e.g. your passport identity, but from your soul.
So dance was originally a celebration of communion. The first groups of humans danced to the gods so that the earth would be fertile, they’d be able to hunt the animals, and spring would bring its fruits. They believed that if they didn’t dance the gods wouldn’t give them their abundance. So people danced to music together. Then, slowly, dance became a show with an audience and a virtuoso ballet dancer. The greatest dancers were those who were able to use their technique to express their passion, their feelings with the grace of Nijinsky or Baryshnikov. But the common citizens stopped dancing. “Dance is not for me. It’s only for other people. I can’t dance. I can’t sing.” So they repressed their dance. And in Biodanza we learn to dance again. We discover that we’re all dancing. We realise that even when we’re worried we are dancing a dance of angst and depression. But we can learn the dance of joy.
We can evoke joy. We can’t control emotions but we can evoke them. We can become receptive to them. We can breathe, move, enter into the rhythm of music, look at people, and our mood will begin to shift. And then we can look at someone and smile easily because of the phenomenon known as emotional contagion. If you enter the subway and everybody’s got the blues you’ll also get the blues. But if you enter the dance hall and people are colourful and open you’ll quickly change your mood. Moods are changeable. “Oh, it was raining. I felt so depressed that I wanted to die. But look at the sun today! How wonderful! I want to live, to dance, and to love.” All this can happen in the same day. So our moods can easily change. We can put some powerful music on.
Music therapy has a lot of material about the way music can reach us directly through emotions. Music doesn’t reach us through reason but through the heart. “Why are you playing this song? It reminds me of her, and now my heart is hurting. Please stop that song.” Similarly, if we listen to happy music, those who were depressed can feel renewed and reborn. This is the music we use in Biodanza, music that is capable of changing your mood. Then we emphasize movements that are filled with meaning. If I want to awaken eroticism I put something with a sinuous rhythm and begin to dance with sinuosity. This awakens something in me and I begin to feel sensual. If I want vitality I can also connect to the vital energy through music. So when we bring together a song that has a message and an organic movement filled with meaning, then we have Biodanza, the dance of life. We need to recuperate meaningful gestures because our human gestures are becoming dissociated, empty, meaningless. But there are gestures filled with meaning. Our bodies are designed for certain expressions. When I open my heart you understand what I mean. When I open my hands and smile you understand what I want. If I walk around with a big frown you also understand what’s happening. The body gives lots of information.
We have rhythm in our breathing, in the beating of the heart, and in the circulation of our blood. The hands are melodic. They come from the chest and translate the melody of friendship, love, tenderness, solidarity and intimacy. Our movements are rhythmic and melodic. Myths evolved into philosophy and we created the rational world. This took us away from our body. We spend hours sitting down using the intellect and lost the expression of the body. The German philosopher Nietzsche said, “Don’t trust any thought that you have elaborated whilst sitting down.” That’s why we will dance the thoughts.
In Biodanza we dance philosophy. The philosopher Nietzsche talked about the will and potency, the impulse to express, the cosmic force that drive us to go forth. The whole universe is moved by this force and we dance this force. The cosmos is not there, outside of the world. The cosmos is in us because there is order in the midst of chaos. And Biodanza is a way of incorporating more order, more cosmos. We can’t avoid the tendency towards chaos because the universe is expanding, increasing its speed, going further and further, and moving faster and faster. The result is that the galaxies are distancing from each other, the stars are fading and the planets will become lost in the dark and cold void. So chaos is the beginning and the end of everything. And knowing this what shall we do? We shall dance!
Nietzsche also spoke about three stages of human thought. The first state of mind is like the camel carrying the whole world on the shoulders. “Oh I have to do this. I should do this. I am guilty and I will carry my cross. It’s my duty. It’s my obligation.” If you carry the whole world on your shoulders then you’re like a camel. In the second stage you are like a lion. “I am. I can. I go. I want.” But the lion is not the final stage. The third state of mind is like the child, being a child again, dancing, playing, and enjoying. All great minds have the soul of a child. They don’t take themselves seriously. “Oh I have something so important to tell you. I don’t know if you are ready. It’s something fundamental. To be or not to be.” So don’t take yourself too serious. That doesn’t mean that Biodanza doesn’t have a method.
Biodanza has a fabulous theoretical model, a great symphony that you discover during the training. That’s why the teacher training lasts 3 years, because you transform your body, your movement, your expression, your vivencia and from there your thoughts and beliefs. The vivencia is fundamental to transform the beliefs. A thought can replace another thought. But you keep on changing thoughts. A thought thinks another thought that leads to another thought. Words speaks of other words and yet another words. They merely change at the symbolic level. We need to involve the body and the emotions, and from there change everything at the visceral, emotional and cognitive levels. That’s the vivencia. It involves everything. It involves the whole body. And psychology has already accepted this.
Psychologists know that Freud spoke about the unconscious. They know that there is an unconscious, and that the conscious is just a small island in the huge unconscious ocean. No one is the master of his destiny. Life can quickly take you to places you’ve never imagined because while you were worried about organising the payment of your bills your unconscious was busy preparing things for you and now it drags you here, there and everywhere, and you realise that you’re not the owner of your life. If you get closer to your unconscious then you can become more attuned to your destiny. When you dance your unconscious you enter in syntony with it. When you deny it, it pulls you in a different direction and you find yourself wondering, “How did I end up here? How could this happen to me? I did what everybody wanted me to do and now my life is upside down.” This happened because your unconscious was busy doing things you weren’t aware of.
Modern psychology tells us that the unconscious is the body. The unconscious is not in our language or dreams. The unconscious is in the body. The way you look reveals your defences, your fears and your needs. Your body reveals who you are. You’re all naked. Your body shows who you are. Psychological changes are physical changes. We need to disarm the defences, to dissolve our armour. “I am like this. This is my way of being. I am strong and nobody can reach me.” Defences are our protective shields. Inside the superman mask you might find a scared little boy.
So the way you live your life shapes your body and its expression. Biodanza helps you to change this and incorporate new gestures, get grounded, experience connection, unleash your expression and change patterns. That’s why we develop the 5 lines of vivencia. The line of vitality brings health, joy and energy. The line of sexuality opens us to pleasure and enjoyment. The line of creativity helps us change our life and choose what we want to do. The line of affectivity is about the world of feelings, all the feelings we have, like love and friendship. And the line of transcendence is about realising our connection with everything, that we’re not isolated or abandoned, but in connection with totality. We are like individual musical notes in harmony with the universal symphony. We are part of the greatest work of art that is the universe. These are vivencias, and not just ideas. These are things that we can dance.
And today I invite you to dance. All I ask is that you are receptive, willing to connect with the group and to allow the music to touch you so that the dance arises. And from there the vivencia will arise. Biodanza is now all over the world, e.g. Netherlands, United Kingdom, Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Canada, Israel, and many other countries. Everybody is doing Biodanza and using this same language. And you can be part of this world where dance recovers its original function of communion and celebration of life.
