It’s a Saturday evening, and I’m in a school hall decked out with psychedelic wall hangings. My good friend Emma has come along with me for the ride. We slip our shoes off, fill our bottles with lemon water, and each stick on a pair of headphones designed to amplify the sound. Hovering in the outer reaches of the room, clutching our bags to our middles, we’re definitely not part of the inner circle. ‘You can leave your bags over there, it’s a safe place here’, someone tells us, and we waver for a minute before relenting and placing our valuables out of sight.
We’re here for an ‘Ecstatic Dance and Cacao Ceremony’, organised by Ecstatic Dance London. Neither of us have attended an event like this before, and we’re game but a little nervous. My immediate reference point is that classic Peep Show episode about Rainbow Rhythms – ‘now we flow into red, the colour of primal urges’ – which doesn’t really paint Ecstatic Dance in the best light. Emma is going through a rough patch at work, and normally we’d have sliced up the situation every which way over a bottle of wine. Tonight though, we barely have a chance to talk, and we won’t be drinking that bottle of wine. According to the instructions we received before the event: ‘When we dance without the chitchat, something alchemical can happen on the dancefloor. A unified field of being emerges and we feel both wild and free, contained within ourselves and connected to something much, much greater than our individual selves’. The lack of wine doesn’t get much of a write-up, but I know that sobriety is foundational to the ‘conscious clubbing’ movement. Many of us elder millennials grew up thinking we had to be drunk to dance in public. Events like this are built on the radical premise that in fact that’s not the case. So, Emma and I find ourselves sitting in a large ring of people, all holding hands (it’s very kumbaya) and ‘setting our intention’ for the evening as we sip our little cups of cacao. The music, when it begins, has a beguiling effect: two hours of deep house, rising from gentle beginnings through to an emotional peak and down again. Beside the DJ booth is a video projector, playing looping visuals of mountains and deserts, forests and waterfalls and streams. Although there’s a strict ‘no spectating’ policy, I can’t help but note that the other participants seem overwhelmingly at home in their own skin. They’re dancing beautifully, inhabiting the music with ease. For my own part, I had worried that I’d be too self-conscious to let go. I’m reassured to find that I do lose myself in the music, and I stop worrying about the gaucheness of my moves. It’s as though I’m being carried along on a current, and to do anything other than dance would be to swim against the tide. Emma is enjoying herself too. We stay tightly pressed against the periphery of the room, and our body language makes clear that we don’t want to be approached. But we’re dancing non-stop, and we’re losing track of time. And though I’m not spectating on Emma (promise!), I clock that she too is surfing on whatever wave has filled the room. She and I slip away shortly before the end, feeling… if not ecstatic, then certainly better than we did beforehand. We haven’t sorted through her work situation, or any of the other issues we’re hauling around with us. But we’re replenished, recharged, better positioned to face whatever life throws at us next. Our load has been lightened. It’s strange getting the tube home at 10pm on a Saturday without the slightest hint of bleariness. I’d say in all sincerity that I did go on a ‘journey’ over the past two hours, and that I did touch base with something spiritual. Dance has been core to human societies since Palaeolithic times. As Barbara Ehrenreich argues in her book Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (2006), dance has bonded groups together, provided an essential release valve, and connected people with the spiritual realm. She cites the statistic that 92% of small-scale societies partook in ecstatic group rituals like dancing, with a view to entering religious trance states. Needless to say, that’s not how we tend to think of it today. When we’re throwing shapes on the dancefloor, we’re generally not all that amenable to being filled with the presence of the gods. And yet this was the rule until relatively recently. The Ancient Greeks had a strong cult of Dionysus, god of both ecstasy and terror. His followers engaged in frenzied dances, culminating in a state called enthousiasmos, ‘having the god within oneself’. Sufi Islam famously has its whirling dervishes, whose characteristic spinning movements are intended as a form of meditation; while Haitian Vodou practitioners dance until the spirit takes hold. As Ehrenreich explores, ‘civilised’ Western society is very much the anomaly. From the 16 th century onwards, people became increasingly suspicious of movement, succumbing to a ‘routine immobilisation’ in which entertainment was passively consumed and sports watched rather than played. If you danced at all, it was only in a formal, stylised context. But Ehrenreich also notes that the ‘wildness of the world’ can’t be held back indefinitely. Starting in the 1960s, the forces that had been repressed found a way to resurface, with an explosion of new musical genres that ‘reopened the possibility of ecstasy’ and positively compelled you to dance. It’s no accident that ecstatic dance and raves – along with the emergence of rock and roll into white culture – took off around this time. Ecstatic Dance is usually said to have started life in the 1970s, in the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. It’s here that the American dancer Gabrielle Roth devised her 5Rhythms technique, which is now practised in many countries around the world. As she explained it: ‘I have found a language of patterns I can trust to deliver us into universal truths, truths older than time. In the rhythm of the body, we can [access] states of being where all identities dissolve into an eternal flow of energy’. Since then, several different flavours of ‘conscious dance’ have arisen, Ecstatic Dance and Biodanza among them. As Alena Pashnova, founder of Ecstatic Dance Online, told me, ecstatic dance is less about tapping into states of ‘ecstasy’ and more about accessing the full spectrum of your emotions – bringing your whole self to the party. ‘I want people to sometimes bring sadness or anger, this shadow side that we sometimes don’t have space to work with,’ she said. ‘I understand it’s easier to hit that ecstatic stateand to connect on that level. But I want to invite people to go deeper and process darker things through dance.’ A parallel and related development was the rise of the rave. In the 1980s, new electronic music genres sprung from the house music scene in Chicago and the techno scene in Detroit. A subculture emerged, centring around these new musical forms. First in clubs, then in abandoned warehouses, and then in open fields, thousands of young people convened for what became known as ‘the Second Summer of Love’. As the authorities cracked down on these events, and commercial interests came to the fore, the utopian nature of the early raves was impossible to preserve. But pockets of the original rave spirit have always remained, spilling out into warehouse parties, club nights, festivals and underground gatherings. In Robin Sylvan’s 2005 book Trance Formation, he pays homage to the ‘tremendous spiritual and religious power’ of raves. He writes: ‘For thousands of ravers worldwide, raves are one of their primary sources of spirituality and the closest thing they have to a religion. This is a theme that has emerged repeatedly in my research.’ In his view, there are three key aspects that contribute to the spiritual dimension of raves. The first is the raw experience, which for many people presents as a moment of insight on the dancefloor. ‘It’s when you're dancing, and then all of a sudden, you’re like, “Oh wow, I understand what this is all about”,’ he told me when we spoke. ‘That’s life-changing for a lot of people. It correlates with the classic religious experiences that you can find in traditional religions’. Then there are the ceremonial or ritual aspects. Ecstatic Dance has its cacao ceremonies and closing rites, and while ‘normal’ raves might seem more anarchic, they follow a specific template too. ‘Usually those peak experiences will happen at 2, 3, 4 in the morning after you’ve been dancing for a long time’, said Sylvan. ‘You’re not having those experiences by accident – there’s a whole structure that’s been set up to move you in that direction’. The third similarity is an overarching system of meaning. In the 1990s, ravers commonly used the acronym PLUR (peace, love, unity, respect) to describe their ethos, while many ravers today belong to a psychedelic, ‘consciousness-expanding’ counterculture. It’s not quite Buddhism’s Noble Eightfold Path, but it comes close. Of course, given the association between raves and mindless hedonism, the notion of the rave as a site of spiritual awakening can be divisive. But as Sylvan pointed out, one of the interesting things about current spiritual expression is the way in which it bubbles out of, and bleeds into, secular spaces. ‘I don’t think people set out to create religious experiences through raves’, he said. ‘It’s almost like spirituality emerges out of this thing that no one was expecting it to. But whenyou step back, it makes a lot of sense. The bottom line for me is that music is one of the most powerful tools we have for inducing religious experience’. Forget the conceptual spin or the wacky terminology that might accrue around this scene; what makes a dance event spiritual may be simply that it jolts you into your humanness. You’re not some robot working their way down a to-do list. You’re here, embodied, feeling, moving, alive – a strange and miraculous human animal. As Alena Pashnova put it: ‘We all define our spirituality in so many different ways, but I believe that the core values are the same. It’s difficult to be alive, but at the same time it’s amazing to be alive. And we all have different stories, but at the same time, the same story. We’re born, we go through life, we enjoy it and we suffer, and at the end we will die’. In common with many other spiritual practices popular today, dance is in many ways an attempt to get back to basics. I’ve heard it time and again: such-and-such practice puts you back in touch with your intuition. It takes you out of your head. Reconnects you with your community and the wider world. Taking it up a level, it connects you with some kind of knowing that was there all along, which you’ve forgotten amid the noise of the thinking mind. It's not that every dance event is a sacred space – having been to a fair share of grimy clubs in my youth, I would beg to differ. But I do think the dancefloor can be a site of transportive experiences. Whether you’re practicing Biodanza, pumping your arms at a warehouse rave, or tearing up Burning Man, you may have fleetingly touched on the numinous. You may also have found solace, connection, emotional healing and a visceral reminder that you’re alive. This feature has been extracted from The Spirituality Gap: Searching for Meaning in a Secular Age by Abi Millar (£14.99, September Publishing) and reproduced with permission from the publisher.Abi Millar is a journalist and author living in London. She studied English at Cambridge University and science journalism at City University London and has written for outlets including Patient, Netdoctor, Elle, Harpers Bazaar, New Statesman and Vice. She is also a yoga teacher (and soon-to-be personal trainer) who has long been fascinated by the intersection of critical thinking and spirituality. The Spirituality Gap is her first book.
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