Spiral dance

Vegetarian Times, Nov, 1998 by Andrea Mather

Discovering the divine through movement.

I am spinning and spinning to a drumbeat that pounds relentlessly and hypnotically. My arms sweep upward into ecstatic arcs and waves. I am simply a body, embracing rhythm. As I whiff, I abandon my job, family role, travails and triumphs. I am honoring the moment through movement. Not bad for someone who never thought of herself as a dancer.

This form of dance, called DanceKinetics or YogaRhythmics, has become one of the most powerful things in my life. Yet I discovered it almost by accident. On the last day of a retreat at Kripalu, a yoga community in Massachusetts' Berkshire Mountains, I wandered into a class totally unlike the contemplative yoga classes I'd been taking, taught by gentle teachers with soft voices. At one end of the room, a woman was cuing up partylike music. With her velvet tights, bright purple shirt and big smile, she was spilling over with vitality. And by the end of class, the rest of us meditative yogis would be too.

It began with simple yoga stretches and progressed to dancing in a circle to nightclub-style music. Slowly, our teacher's movement became a sinewy, pantherlike gait. The next thing I knew, we were all slinking through the room, four-legged creatures crossing a grassy plain. We tested out other movements, and as I temporarily shed my inhibitions and habitual ways of moving, I felt lighter. I left the class sweaty and full of smiles. Up until then, I'd felt satisfied with my experience--a serene week of relaxation and working on my yoga practice. But this class pulled back the veil and gave me a glimpse of something beyond. Namely, bliss.

Once home, I became obsessed with finding a class like that one. I have a complicated history with exercise. As an asthmatic, I've always maintained a distrust of my body--never knowing for sure if I could count on it in any given situation. There have been times when I attended aerobic classes, but I loathed their militaristic atmosphere. One wrong step and I'd be hopelessly offbeat for the rest of the song. One barked correction from the instructor and I was transported back to the hell that was high school gym class, where a sadistic teacher singled me out as her favorite victim. Eventually, I sought refuge in hatha yoga classes. There I always found a respectful testing of my physical and mental limits.

It took a few weeks, but I found what I was looking for in Sheelah Black's class in Rye, N.Y. With an eclectic musical mix as our backdrop--an ethereal cut from the Cirque De Soleil soundtrack, a percussive African soliloquy, a soulful anthem from Aretha Franklin, a meditative Native American flute piece--we try on different identities: The stiff maneuvers of a robot. The graceful gestures of a goddess. The ecstatic pulsing of a tribal dancer. I challenge my usual movements, releasing myself from a carefully constructed box and expanding into the world around me. Often, grief, anger or fear bubbles up inside me, but I honor that feeling by dancing it rather than shielding myself from it. I dive into its essence until emotion becomes motion and loses its hold on me. I move with my full power as my defenses, armor long since outgrown, fall away, no longer protecting me from perceived assaults as well as potential joy.

Around me, daughters, mothers, lovers and elders gyrate, cackle, weep and howl. As one, we weave our arms snakelike to the sky and circle our hips in sinuous loops. Fleshy curves and womanly bellies are a definite asset. As we create our own spirals from within and without, we are dancing as much with each other as with the divine, the rhythm that drives us all.

Andrea Mather is associate editor of Vegetarian Times.