5Rhythms is a movement school teaching a consistent approach to body-focussed, free-form movement meditation in community. It's part of a dynamic constellation of related "embodiment" and "conscious dance" disciplines emerging in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in North America and western Europe. Created by American artist, writer, and theatre director Gabrielle Roth (1941-2012), 5Rhythms is a practice to engage the human body and awareness in improvised, expressive movement. It starts from the proposition that when you put the psyche in motion, it can heal itself. In 5Rhythms movement is:
- a meditation :: a practice of being with reality by intentionally occupying this flesh and this breath
- a method :: continuing to feel and move the body, taking one breath and one step at a time, is a highly accessible form
- a medicine :: diving into our inner worlds and connecting with others and the group brings healing in natural pulses
- a metaphor :: body shapes and patterns are an infinitely rich language of expression, meaning, and imagination
- a message :: all people are lovingly invited to experiment with the discipline and the liberating tendencies of this dance across cultures, colours, creeds, genders, sexualities, life stages, ages, sizes, abilities, health status and financial circumstance
The 5Rhythms process is called a Wave. It's a progression of energy and experience that's deeply familiar.
As earthlings, we're part of the natural order of things, and we know this Wave from simply being alive. Whether we’ve thought about it or not,
we are intimate with the way all things naturally arise, take form, grow strong and destabilize, come to new resolutions, and finally pass away.
The 5Rhythms re-create that basic wave, over and over, on a dance floor:
The 5Rhythms Wave
Flowing: come in
An invitation to enter a fluid continuum of movement that supports, nurtures, and circulates in us from deep in the ground.
You might soften, sensitize, tune in, and begin to receive and allow whatever is authentic, however it arrives.
You might soften, sensitize, tune in, and begin to receive and allow whatever is authentic, however it arrives.
Staccato: come out
An invitation to articulate with our bodies, moving in conscious action: a time for unhindered expression from centre to cosmos.
You could let your response to the beat ignite you and support you to claim and attend to your direction, purposefulness, clarity, boundaries, and heart.
You could let your response to the beat ignite you and support you to claim and attend to your direction, purposefulness, clarity, boundaries, and heart.
Chaos: come down
An invitation to non-harming shaking, rocking, rumbling and rolling medicine, where it's a relief to give way to vibrational outpourings of physical freedom.
You might fall into releasing, un-patterning, surrendering movements, received from mysterious impulses and caught by the ground.
You might fall into releasing, un-patterning, surrendering movements, received from mysterious impulses and caught by the ground.
Lyrical: come up
An invitation to relax into more elbow room and open horizons on easy updrafts of movement that can lift us right through the surface of things.
You could break and ease into refreshing, re-patterning movements that arise without effort and waft you along.
You could break and ease into refreshing, re-patterning movements that arise without effort and waft you along.
Stillness: come home
An invitation to follow movements all the way to endings in an embodiment of devotion, guiding ourselves back to centre and to the presence of every part in the whole.
You might accept the offer of a pure, empty, total space in which to breathe, re-integrate, and re-align.
You might accept the offer of a pure, empty, total space in which to breathe, re-integrate, and re-align.
5Rhythms can be entered and used as a philosophy and a perspective - a way of looking at the world and its phenomena. It encompasses different “maps” of exploration, and many different teachers - with as many circles of community. This school of movement seeks to
empower people to transform suffering into art, art into awareness, and awareness into action.
My invitation as a student and teacher in this discipline is permanent: come dance your own waves.
empower people to transform suffering into art, art into awareness, and awareness into action.
My invitation as a student and teacher in this discipline is permanent: come dance your own waves.