Sprung Floors

Homes #2: Conscious Dancing in the City

Feet in motion, small steps, big steps. In my head I was never a dancer: I attended one ballet class, maybe more, when I was very small; my brother and I present under duress and then moaning so much about it afterwards that my poor mother gave up on her plan. Billy Elliots we were not. In terms of learnt steps, it was years later that I briefly tried salsa, while playing in a very ambitious 10-piece salsa band. I had a complete jol playing the complex lines and helping create a deep groove for the punters. But we were definitely better off, we felt, providing the entertainment rather than trying to bailar así ourselves. I had a go, too, at tango: fluid motion that I wasn't about to excel at. There was something there, but I couldn't quite get the beat and didn't at that stage have the patience to persist. Perhaps my repressed personality just needed a lot of release before it was willing to accept the form of steps on the dancefloor. 

But my body knew, as bodies do, that I was in fact a dancer. I remember 'dancing' and drinking, of course, as a teenager trying to move through inhibitions. The neon eighties lights, evenings of being tongue-tied around girls with cheap and shiny handbags as their preferred dancefloor partners. The formica surfaces with stains of freshly spilled commercial beer. The attempts at looking mainstream smart-ish to pass the bouncers, eyes a little averted if we were still technically under age. The glitzy names: Ritzy's, Peppermint Park, The Jacquard, The Waterfront. And somewhere in this pack of hormonal beings, and a little before Dexy's Midnight Runners, or Iggy Pop, or REM closed off the evening, my body began to find some ancient movements, spurred on by the beats. And for many years, that was it. 

Once I moved to Cape Town in my early twenties, a foggy cocktail of tobacco, marijuana, and Windhoek lager often punctuated my evenings, yet somehow I found something new on the dancefloor. Perhaps this was influenced by most of my dancing now happening on the classic wooden floors of houses in Observatory and other student suburbs, where I could begin to loosen up and find a spring in my step. Oh sure, there were clubs in nineties Cape Town too: the Galaxy where I saw the confident "jazz" dancers, from the 'Coloured' communities where jazz of a certain kind (inspired particularly by George Benson's smooth guitar) was supremely popular; and then Ruby in the Dust; the Magnet; Getafix and others that jump through that hazy time in my mind. Mostly I recall starting to find my own groove in a Woodstock living room, to drum'n'bass, after a gloriously creative antinuclear march. 

And then there were dances outside, in a different climate to my childhood, where beach and mountain provided great ways for the body to ground in movement and nature connection, while the mind flew. I attended some of the regular, infamous nineties raves at the Ostrich Farm north of Cape Town, dancing into the mornings, seeing Table Mountain in the distance as the sun rose, and determinedly proving that you could dance right through the night without taking ecstasy (I was decidedly anti-chemical), if anyone was listening. Which they weren't, of course: they were too busy dancing themselves. Later in life, my then-partner, Carey, headed out of town to EarthDance and other raves on the soil with a little bit of sacredness thrown into the mix. It took me a while to be persuaded, though: the container of sprung wooden floors was an essential part of my journey and still is a real home for me when I land on one. I’ve danced round fires with seriously crazy intent since then, rediscovering that ancestral story; and yet the clarity of prepared floors, swept clean (sometimes by me, always with reverence!) remains an arrival moment I cherish. A 4-walled crucible into which new imaginings can be embodied.

I must have instinctively felt this need to move growing, as I took a couple of contemporary dance classes at the studios of Jazzart, Cape Town's long-standing and brilliant Afro+contemporary dance company, rehearsing at the back of what is these days the Artscape complex (back in the nineties it was still known as the Nico Malan centre, after a forgettable apartheid-era politico) - in the concrete heart of the city's Brutalist Foreshore.  And there I remembered, of course, freer movement as a child, including dramatic movement classes at Premises, Norwich's Arts Centre, racing through open spaces, across the planks, finding animal shapes and collective monsters. Hippies loved to dance even in the staidness of seventies England (my mother was a keen circle dancer), and that was all so much more innocent than the nasty eighties teenage club version of a dancer, still in need of personal exorcism when I started to move in the nineties!

Sure, there were other important pieces of my journey back into my body, which had been so ignored in my highly academic high school and college education. I’d enjoyed the endorphins and the rhythms of running, which I took to the beach once I’d moved to Muizenberg, the irregular regularity of the tidal pulse accompanying my bare feet. I’ve danced alone, subsequently, in wild places; finding inner music, so not needing the noisy ghettoblasters of youth (still today, it’s a curious phenomenon to find groups clambering up Lion’s Head, and having to bring their beats with them rather than letting the rocks offer up their songs). I’ve danced solo on mountain tops, forest walks, and, yes, beaches, like a friend who persuaded the cops she needed to dance every morning for the sake of her health, when South Africa’s beaches were bizarrely locked down.

Yet it’s still those familiar sprung floors that have been favourite chalices for my body-temple. I’ve stretched, breathed, followed the yogic energy into many a downward dog there; as the years have passed, I’ve seen these routines as aspects of deep preparation for more creative work on the dancefloor. And of course, having two dancers as parents, this has fed through to my daughters, who have danced more than me at Alive studio down the road, particularly with belly dance and contemporary/hip-hop styles. That’s where, long ago, I first found my Tai Chi energy ball and felt the sweet motion of a sequence; and the relaxation in my muscles of Qigong exercises, gathering energy from the stars into the Dan Tien region – that core balance point below the navel, the Hara in the yoga tradition. Another venue was a little further away, at The Forge in Kalk Bay, where we moved Chinese-style but also, some years later, some curious movements called ‘The Form’, described as somehow Tantric, somehow channelled, and a little complex, but still a structured series of sequences: movement, breath, energy, slowness, dropping in. I know some people remain deeply moved by consistent sequences like these. And others prefer the high-energy planned patterns of Nia or its Latino counterpart, Zumba: workouts with a bit of spirit mixed in, in my limited experience – often found in gyms as much as dance studios. I’ve attended a few Nia classes where there was opportunity for creative expression too, alongside their martial-arts-style belt system. My own journey, however, was bound to lead me more towards dance as an imaginative journey for the body and a spiritual practice for body heart and mind: as Gabrielle Roth famously said, as an opportunity to ‘Sweat Your Prayers’. Listening to what movements the body itself is calling forth, as much as intending them in a certain direction.

My creative, conscious dance journey really began in earnest at the Kalk Bay Community Centre, on a Monday night in 2005, when Hannah Loewenthal was offering a regular Five Rhythms class there. The space, with her metal bars, balcony, roof turret, and, above all, forgiving floors would become deeply familiar to me from then on. True, one dancer’s partner came and declared she found unhappy ghosts there, twenty years ago. Perhaps I didn’t find them then because of my relative privilege, and possibly my insensitivity to the histories of this land, criss-crossed by so many ancestors engaging with the violence of industrial-age colonisation. But I have felt the waves of strong, positive energy generated when people move freely, in ways that their bodies love. One key aspect that makes the KBCC still a kind of Home for me is the memories of friends and connections in the space. When I enter it, it pulses with these memories: not of trapped ghosts, unacknowledged ancestors in an overly-modern amnesiac world, but memories that are themselves a pulsing engine, supporting my movements. For me, our liberated dances sink into the floorboards, into the walls, transform the stuckness they might find there, and support us in continuing to find authentic movements.

The 5 Rhythms: a modern-shamanic dance practice out of New York, driven by Roth, who created her own music to drive her intentions forward, beginning with a deep dialogue with body parts: how does your elbow want to dance today? Of course, she was following in the footsteps of other US women who had been freeing the body from the walking sleep most Westerners were stuck in (outside of the never-to-be-mentioned-nights-before-morning-afters in clubs; outside of that nineties drug-fuelled rave explosion that I’d briefly flirted with). Finding joy in the body itself, no additives necessary. The eponymous ‘five rhythms’ are more of a beautiful understanding of the sequence of a conscious dance, as a wave that echoes the movements of life and energy. A Flow that softens me into movement; Staccato, where I find the more masculine, formed edges (one of the first friends I danced with there described it as ‘channelling your inner Michael Jackson’, which is part of the Staccato story for sure, though by no means all of it). Then Chaos, wild high-energy release, only to be expected when bringing feminine and masculine together. And as the Wave crests we drop into a kind of sweet post-coital Lyrical mood (chilled, Latino, and sometimes a good opportunity to meet the softened eyes of other dancers); before the final rhythm, Stillness – Tantrically/shamanically/oxymoronically finding the movement within that. Rest in motion, and then motion in Rest.

This was the basic journey Hannah led us through, with weekly dedication: a spiritual moment for me away from the wildness of my weeks teaching small children, and parenting smaller ones, with at that time a seriously dancefloor-experienced partner at home too, who had gently led me to this path. When I’d met Carey she’d been training in eurythmy, yet another way of working creatively with music, spoken word, body movements, and the energies that arose, as taught at the Waldorf schools I’ve worked in for many years (one of which Hannah had once attended). Yet Carey too needed a little more free expression, which when I met her she was finding through fire poi, adding paraffin-fuelled flames and chains to the driving energy of the dance. Dr Raoul Goldberg was then the anthroposophical doctor on hand for children at the Waldorf schools, but also on his own expansive journey. His was another face I began to meet on conscious/ecstatic dancefloors, where he agreed with me that this conscious movement journey was a ‘missing piece’ in anthroposophical practice, a little messier, more earthy, more fiery, more improvised, more exploratory than the forms on offer, for all their value in helping young people to land.

Carey soon began running events at the Community Centre herself, over the road from the whales in the bay: she brought in more of an intuitive, Gaia-aligned series of themes to her regular Friday night Waves, or to full moon gatherings, all beginning with a Spring Equinox dance in September 2007. This was a kind of conscious anchoring, of bringing in of the unseen energies longing to move with us and to be recognised, just as the moon’s cycles and the sun’s annual ones call us to a broader beat. Soon she was doing this in collaboration with other facilitators, offering movement opportunities on an alternating basis over the course of the weeks. Over the years since then I’ve run things in the space too, like dozens of others: that drama teacher’s call to action - “Move Back the Desks!” - never necessary in an open space, where the invitation to move is already present. Freed to be ourselves, I recall one new friend looping and sweeping through lower and upper worlds, another with a characteristic mischievous lope, and then there were those who I saw across the floor, finding their flow, sometimes also finding mine as we swirled around, joining luminous energy fields and feeling something thick, magical, temporary. As more than one facilitator has reflected, on the conscious dancefloor you could have a whole relationship in a few minutes, and say a respectful farewell, and find your way back to centre, to self, and above/below all, to ground. To the floor itself.

Another fertile dance temple I met back in 2005 was Erin Hall in Rondebosch. A venue guided originally by the late John Oliver, a Christian priest who believed very much in bringing the Cape’s multi-faith communities together; and here I was introduced to Biodanza, this time a modality emerging from Latin America directly, via a Chilean psychologist, Rolando Toro, and being delivered by Carolina, a bubbly Argentinean. I would describe Biodanza as a system of gentle scaffolding towards greater joy in the body – alegria – and in direct conversation, often, with other bodies: starting with simple exercises like dance-walking, with a sway and a bounce in every step. Even this, of course, is too much for many physically repressed Westerners. One friend, a Biodanza facilitator who also worked with corporate clients, told me he once got a conservative group of managers to dance-walk on the second day of working with them. “It was way too soon – I should have waited till day four!” In the Biodanza classes, this led on towards direct contact – exploring, say, the hands of another in dance, an improvised listening between them before the facilitator called time. A safe way, if you like, to explore movement and chemistry: boundaried dancefloor flirtation. For a while Carey and I would travel weekly to the ‘advanced’ Biodanza group in the far northern suburbs, in a Scout hall of all places. Still wooden floors, forgiving, absorbing, waiting to be played with, and a gentle Afrikaner pyschologist running the show. I vividly recall one moment of supporting dance partners with angel wings at their backs. Embodied imagination, at the heart of this journey.

At one point in 2006, a French shaman, Philippe Lenaif, whose work had been recognised by Rolando Toro, came to South Africa – partly to connect with local traditional healers, but also to run some workshops, one of which was a Biodanza class for men only at Erin Hall. It was packed, and a good, honest, deep dive into homosocial, affectionate energy between largely heterosexual men: he commented that he was surprised at the large turnout, because back in Europe men still had a huge level of suspicion about body-wisdom. Of course, plenty of South African men do too, but perhaps enough of us were already open to a bigger journey with the body. And of course, our own shamanic/sangoma traditions in southern Africa already privilege trance dancing, in outdoor ceremonial spaces; Lenaif was not the first to engage with these local traditions too during his visits, and share aspects in the more confined hall space.

If Biodanza works a lot with the creative ‘chemistry’ between people, a third modality, contact improvisation, is often described as being more about the physics of movement, touch and connection. In its modern incarnation it began, yet again, in the Americas: this time in San Francisco, where ‘contact jams’ began, emerging out of creative explorations of how bodies could interact together. I get a sense that none of this was very new: even apartheid South Africa had its fair share of underground seventies hippies back in the day playing with creative movement, and Grotowski’s Poor Theatre explorations in Poland go back even further. Perhaps the difference is the way it’s all gone more mainstream as time has gone on, more established, more accessible. In Cape Town, we were tuned in in the 2000s to the burgeoning tradition in Denmark, Germany and beyond: facilitators and guides came from there to help us explore on church hall floors, including at the Theatre Arts Admin Collective I mentioned in my previous Home article. Contact improv calls directly for conscious, feeling awareness in moving; exploring pressure, weight, using each other as hinges, springboards, supports, levers; usually without the comfort of accompanying music; forging patterns and shapes together. If Grotowski recognised the body as the actor’s key instrument, but still aimed mostly at plays with individual characters, then contact improv uses these unfolding patterns themselves as the ‘characters’, forms emerging in relation to other bodies.

For me, these were the three key elements I took from those early years of my relationships with ‘conscious dance’. One variation came via Shakti Malan, a dynamo who became Cape Town’s leading Tantra teacher, but was also part of that advanced Biodanza group, as she was completing her facilitator training. When she qualified, she created her own modality – ‘Blissdance’ – still going strong today through other facilitators, though Shakti herself passed away some years ago - blending Biodanza with more explicitly Eastern Tantric ideas, as well as indications from Sufism or China. (I first felt the exhilaration of dervish whirling in one of Shakti’s early classes). The dance of Shiva and Shakti is core to Tantra as with other Indian traditions – and Nataraja is Shiva as the dancing king, so it was an obvious way to go, as she pushed the questions of dancefloor chemistry in new directions. Sweet, sweaty, vulnerable, full of gratitude. Dances behind imaginary veils and fans; feline dances, water dances. I heard another Tantra teacher later calling Blissdance, rather dismissively, “treats for seekers”, probably because, while Shakti definitely saw the opportunity to push a little into dancefloor shadow work, you could also sense its connection still to finding alegria, like its Biodanza parent, whereas he was more inclined to see Tantra as a thorny path. For me, the learnings were more about embodied community: meeting and loving others, and in that loving self and body a little more. Contact in all these forms – be it physical, energetic, or distant eyes – meant, of course, it was difficult to feel indifferent to someone, who had, perhaps, let you roll over their back!

In my workplace at Michael Oak Waldorf School another venue had meanwhile emerged in the beautiful arc of the new school hall. Its inaugural event was the school Shakespeare play of 2006: The Two Gentlemen of Verona, set to Cole Porter tunes performed live. I was roped in to play trombone each night, although I was very busy early every morning after with my class 2 group. The hall still sat, for those first shows, on a bare concrete slab: completion had been delayed by the complex engineering problem of an underground stream, discovered in the foundations! Even so, I recall one little boy in my class using a big word to describe the space as he entered for the first time: “Mr Yarrow, this is GLORIOUS!” The sprung floor followed, and soon after conscious dance found the space too on the weekends.

‘Dance the Road’ was the innovation of Phil van Zyl, inspired by his exploration of contact improvisation overseas, but with the intention of bringing the Cape’s burgeoning numbers of conscious dancers together at Michael Oak, for an unfacilitated morning jam to sets by different DJs but without any alcohol or drugs; set off with a yoga class, and closed with gentle live music. With no facilitator, this was an opportunity for us to grow a little more personal accountability and responsibility for what took place, in relation to self, to others, to the ever-forgiving floor. Like all these spaces of dance, it had a crisp bareness to it: a space for imagining, not a place for pre-designed altars and tombs, not a clogged-up cathedral but a sacred opportunity. Dance the Road used other less familiar venues too, ones where I could feel the fresh energy of the dancers exploding, like at the community centre in Observatory where I’d learned some African dance basics some years before. (All these practised forms I feel merging and emerging in my creative dances today).

The year 2010 was a big one for our bipolar nation: soccer lifted the nation’s spirits, fans streamed in from round the world. One soccer fan – a Mancunian, lifelong Manchester City fan called Ya’acov Darling Khan – arrived for different reasons. Like Philippe Lenaif, this European had ‘become’ a shaman fairly dramatically; in his case after being directly struck by lightning, which you can read all about in his fascinating memoir, Jaguar in the Body, Butterfly in the Heart; his shamanic journey would include much work with the Sami people of the far north, as well as the Achua and others in the Amazon, both of whom acknowledge Ya’acov’s shamanic status. And like Lenaif, part of Ya’acov’s offering after this became forms of dance, of working with embodied movement practice, alongside his skilled wife, Susannah. Both of them were long-term senior teachers of Five Rhythms; they had recently chosen to forge ahead instead with their own offering, Movement Medicine, bringing a rich body (pun acknowledged) of knowledge from which I continue to benefit and draw strength. When I read their guide book – also called simply ‘Movement Medicine’ – I felt I’d found the clearest exposition of what being human is all about that I’d ever come across. I fully acknowledge, these days, the power of the dance under the open skies, directly on the land, like our ancestors’ did it, and like our indigenous healing traditions still do it; but I also feel that this modern gathering of dancers on urban sprung floors, warming their spaces with regularity, has created a kind of matrix of vortices for change across the cities and countries; has called and invoked more than we initially knew was possible. I felt it not just in Cape Town, but also, thanks to Movement Medicine particularly, in Johannesburg, on the Garden Route, in Devon, UK, and I’ve met others dancing around the globe. Perhaps it was our consistent dance that finally acted as a drum to call Ya’acov to the Cape. And so in 2011, with Ya’acov at Michael Oak, I took part in the most extraordinary dance I had done to that point: after a rich day and a half of dancing, we took it into an all-nighter. But an all-night dance with structure, with ceremony, fasting, with fully awake bodies, with hearts and minds ready to stretch and offer what we had: truly a rave with Spirit, each step guided with a different focus for connection, calling in the creative Imagination. What I had been calling for, without knowing it, on the Ostrich Farm all those years before.

In the 13 years since then, I’ve kept returning to the dance floor, because it’s truly a home that I need to find again and again; kept connecting in, sensing those distant friendships, sometimes tuning in to the same online dance (particularly during that lockdown period that forced us to find new ways to move together), and most of the people I’m closest to are ones with whom I’ve also shared these spaces where we’ve been wild and crazy together on wooden planks. Many Movement Medicine teachers have been trained since then around the world; Carey was one of the first South Africans to do so. And other local modalities have emerged since. Brian Bergman began alternating nights at Erin Hall in 2013 with Clive Levin (then a new South African Movement Medicine teacher): Brian had recently trained up overseas with a related shamanic-dance practice, Dancing Freedom, but fairly soon both men moved their offerings to the Claremont town hall, a government-owned building where we danced regularly in the deepest of lockdowns through some kind of miracle – crazy sanity in wobbly times. Brian’s own nuanced take on the whole process is now the Dance Awake modality he started and took on training others in; a typically syncretic, holistic system. In Jo’burg, Sian Palmer, a drama therapist who danced many Movement Medicine weekends with us all, began her Expressive Movement offering that has likewise subsequently grown; one regular gathering of facilitators, ‘Wednesday Waves’ down in the Simon’s Town hall, now brings together facilitators trained in these methods but each, of course, sharing their own version of the conscious dance flower; other good friends have regular offerings in the Garden Route; in distant London, one of the most popular offerings turns out to come from an old school friend of my brother. My trip through Mexico tuned me in to other options again. And yet the essential pulse of conscious dance continues through all of these diverse possibilities, expanding and relishing her patterning and unfolding. I will, I’m sure, have much more to say about the kind of learnings the dancefloor has brought me in these long years, as well as her magic and her inspiration. One thing the floorboards have convinced me of is the awareness that we all have this capacity, just waiting to be unlocked; and She is waiting for us to do so, patient mother that she is. Put down that drink and get your booty on the floor anyway: find your way Home.