Dancing as one body

One of the things that I learned when I went to Bulgaria to dance with Anna Shtarbonova and tour sacred sites, is that it was considered very important by the Bulgarians to dance as one body--as one being. I had never heard this said before in any workshops I have taken over the years and it struck me as very profound in its implications. Wow! you mean I'm not just dancing by myself with others doing the same thing, but I am actually am no longer an individual but an integral part of a larger whole? A dancer who had grown up in Bosnia shared that it was considered bad manners in her village to dance in front of another person or behind another person. Thus, it was also important to be aware of one's relationship to the dancers on either side as one danced. My experience is that most of us are only aware of ourselves as we dance and not of the whole group as a dancing body and how our movements might be related to person next to us and the dance as whole.

Another set of concepts that is relevant here that I have learned in various workshops over the years, is that the three most important persons in a line is the leader, the dancer next to him or her and the last person in the line. The second person in line is the bridge and when the leader wishes to improvise, will maintain the basic structure of the dance and thus becomes the leader for a while. The last person in the line helps maintain the formation of the line and the pattern that the leader is tracing on the ground with his or her feet. By hugging the center of the circle (and the centerpiece), the last person in line can prevent the leader from tracing patterns and unable to do anything but circle around the last person in line and the centerpiece. Of course, all the dancers have a responsibility to be aware of the leader and help create the patterns he or she is initiating. A common mistake that is made by inexperienced dancers is that when the line of dancers changes directions, they will slow down and wait for their turn to change direction instead of dancing out to the point where the dancing line turns and then changing direction.

Three-measure dance patterns

As I prepare for the in-depth workshops I will do with women and those few men who are interested, I think about some of the basic teaching bits that I hope to transmit. They are: 1) the three-measure dance is a dance pattern that most clearly has roots in Neolithic times and a matrifocal society that venerated the earth as our mother and the Goddess as the creative force. 2) The most basic dance is the Pravo and this dance multiplies into many variations. So, there are not 10 or 20 different dances, but 10 or 20 variations of the same dance. The names we commonly associate with these dances is Pravo, Cocek, Sta Tria, Issos, Crossing Dance, Zonaradikos and Jeni Jol to name a few. 3) Laura Shannon sees these dances as carrying the wisdom of the ages, a nonverbal message passed down to us from our ancestors. The basic pattern of three measures, two of which progress to the right and one which returns to the left, Laura sees as a tree-of-life pattern. The first measure is the trunk of the tree, the second measures is the brances to one side of the tree and the third measure is the brances to the other side of the tree. 4) In studying the remnants of the Neolithic age which is mostly pottery, we see the design of "three" and an image with a center and something on each side such as the butterfly and the labrys repeated over and over.