Don't the hours grow shorter as the days go by?
             You never get to stop and open your eyes
             One day you're waiting for the sky to fall
             The next you're dazzled by the beauty of it all
​              ~ Bruce Cockburn


Yes, it’s true. The winds shift, the hours feel short, and the sky often feels heavy. And yet, it’s true: spring sweetens the air and summer is coming. Let us stop and open our eyes. Let us put ourselves directly in the path of the beauty of it all.


None of us know how we’ll feel when we rejoin communal dance after and within times of turbulence. My response is to provide a practice space of fundamental softness, sensitivity, patience, curiosity, and care. 

In a word: SWEETNESS.

In this precious world, we’re chronically exposed to existential trouble. Sweetness might seem irrelevant to the sobering weight of all that’s afoot. It’s not. It’s essential. 

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Noticing, recovering, and sharing sweetness = survival. It’s water in the desert. We can locate it, we can collect it, we can share it. We can even generate it.


Using 5Rhythms practices to dance, rest, and inquire, this workshop series will give space and time to unearth and linger with the sweetness that’s absolutely necessary for perseverance and for walking through life in a good way. Chantell and Katie will connect and balance engaged explorations, settling intervals, and integrative ceremony. 
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5Rhythms is a powerful, guided freeform dance practice. It engages the human body and awareness in movement expression, and encourages our reconnection to aliveness, resource, and discernment.

​ABOUT:
Chantell Foss has taught 5Rhythms since 2014 in contexts ranging from community centre drop-in classes, to in-depth workshops in BC and abroad, to trauma recovery groups. She’s nurtured continuous weekly practice in Quw’utsun, moving outdoors during the pandemic to continue tending to communal well-being. She holds practice with justice and equity intent.

Katie Brennan is a certified Lifecycle Celebrant®, a Metaphysical Minister, and a Ceremonial Artist who creates safe sacred spaces for personal transformation. She has danced 5Rhythms since 2013 and produced workshops since 2015.

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WE LOVINGLY WELCOME people of all cultures, colours, creeds, all genders and sexualities, all sizes, all abilities and life stages, any health status, and any financial circumstance. You don’t need to feel strong or energetic to join us. If you're breathing, you've got all you need. Chairs available for seated dance.

We are grateful and humbled to dance on the stolen, occupied territory of K’ómoks First Nation, "care takers of the ‘land of plenty’ since time immemorial". May our gathering and our process produce mindfulness of the continuous wounds of the colonization of this place, and remind us to move towards just, dignified, and thorough decolonization.

COMMUNITY HEALTH
To include those who are immunocompromised/at risk to participate fully, we fully support participants who wish to mask and/or dance physically distanced. 

Doors will be open for air flow and we will use multiple HEPA air filters.

We'll offer a refund for any session missed due to cold/flu/COVID symptoms or known exposure to COVID prior to the workshop. 

Notice before the workshop required for refund. Please follow the guidelines listed HERE.

Currently, this is set at 5 days for vaccinated folks over 18 and  10 days for unvaccinated / not fully vaccinated folks over 18

At this time, we welcome all no matter your vaccination status. 

Group size is capped at 20 to allow for an abundance of personal space.

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DETAILS: 
Saturday, Jun 25th: 11 - 6pm
Saturday, July 30th: 11 - 6pm
Saturday, Aug 13th: 11 - 6pm 


LOCATION:  Royston Hall - 3902S Island Hwy S, Courtenay, BC

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COST: 
We will offer some scholarship spaces.
​No one turned away for lack of funds.
If you'd like to attend under scholarship, please contact Chantell.

Supporter: $145
Standard: $125
Supported: $100​

register for sessions

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5Rhythms practice builds community.

Local 5Rhythms teachers Joanne Winstanley, Anne Marie Hogya (Victoria), Shauna Devlin (Salt Spring) and I are committed to working together. We support each other as we explore this practice. We assist each other to meet the needs of our communities on Vancouver Island and the Gulfs. These women are each committed teachers who hold regular classes in their communities, and offer workshops at home and in other places.

"The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and loving kindness, a community practicing mindful living. This may be the most important thing we can do for the survival of the earth.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh

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Past Workshops

In The Flesh: dance outside
with Chantell Foss and Joanne Winstanley
Saturday July 18, 2020, 11 am - 5:30 pm, Duncan, BC
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This year has bumped us out of our familiar life ways. We’ve been cut loose from familiar rhythms, meaningful activities, and basic contact with others. For many, livelihoods have vanished, and the wellbeing of our loved ones and society is precarious. We may feel closer to our vulnerability, immersed in the unknown.
Meanwhile, wider cultural conversations are calling us to grow beyond habitual biases and perceptions. The communities that orient us and help us navigate change are gathering online, if at all. We may be feeling stretched in many directions, adjusting daily to new information, possibilities, and perspectives. We may be feeling disoriented or alienated.
We may be feeling a lot.
So, we do what we must do to make it through. Sometimes we have the time and means to feel and respond to events as they come. Sometimes, especially when change is fast, intensity is high, or we don’t have easy access to our best ways to express and integrate, we may accumulate a backlog of experience. Where does it go? It goes into the flesh.
We invite you to join us for a day of movement medicine, dancing under the sky, feet on earth, coming home to our body and senses. Supported by the 5Rhythms practice, we will nourish what’s hungry, loosen what’s dammed, cleanse what’s dulled, and self-liberate with gentleness. We will breathe, feel, and move in the flesh.

About the teachers:
Since 2001, Joanne Winstanley has held a steady space for the growth and evolution of Victoria’s robust dance community, and has shared her love of this practice with hundreds of students throughout the region. She approaches this work with a deep respect for its alchemical nature, and for the unique discovery process of each participant. 

Chantell Foss has been an advocate for human creativity, liberation, and embodiment in contexts from childcare and fitness training to university teaching, art gallery and museum education, and yoga practice. She's nurtured 5Rhythms community in Duncan since 2014. Stewarding movement process, she prioritizes humility, curiosity, and truth.
 
The 5Rhythms® is a powerful movement practice which guides participants to re-connect with their own innate body-knowledge, wellness, and wisdom.  Each of the 5Rhythms – Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, and Stillness – is a distinct field of energy-in-motion, and each one holds its own teachings. Moving through a Wave – all 5Rhythms in sequence – we can explore a range of expression, and welcome the ways that life wants to move through us.

Turn the Wheel
3-part Sunday workshop series turning from winter stillness to spring's rebirth
Sunday February 9, HUB @ Cowichan Station, 11am - 5pm
Sunday March 8, Chapel @ Providence Farm, 1843 Tzouhalem Road, 11am - 5pm
Saturday & Sunday April 18 & 19: ONLINE

​We marked  our progress from the freeze, through the thaw, to the breakthrough of new life - in the middle of a global pandemic.
We began just  as the days just begin to noticeably lengthen we ended  in the fullness of spring’s blossom.
The cosmos - all life - is turning. Life is change. Some shifts, like seasons, are wheel-like and expected. They can help us feel at home and connected to a larger rhythm, and they can also challenge or disturb us. Even though we know they will come around, they can also bring surprises, or hold subtle but meaningful shifts that may go unnoticed until we slow down and focus.
In this three-day immersion we used dance, soulful inquiry, and creative experiments to investigate our cycles of change and rest, turning and returning.

Devotion
Devotion includes tending and following from a beginning point, through time and unexpected changes. Devotion includes coming back, over and over, to something good or important.5Rhythms includes devotion. We merge observance of essential routines with unknowable improvisation. We use consistency in form, in balance with forging into pure freedom. It is a process with no finish-line, no “after” picture that’s meant to out-do the “before” picture. It is a process of devotion to personal movement, awareness, and discovery. Let’s join and stay with a dance that includes both orienting anchor points and wide-open spaces. The dance floor will offer solid riverbanks, cleansing rapids, gentle back-eddies, calm surfaces and clear depths to explore.
Let’s enter a dance with devotion to whatever may be.
Feb 21-22, 2020, Kelowna, BC

Nuestro Cuerpo/Our Elemental Body
Evening workshop series
January 23, 24, & 27, 2020, Lima, Peru

​Nuestro Cuerpo: Suelo y Sol 
Our bones are living, moving minerals - pieces of earth. Our hearts are small suns, pulsing in our chests. In the Rhythm of Flowing we’ll embody our grounded being that brings forth life and movement. Through the Rhythm of Staccato we’ll bring our life-loving fire into expression and connection.

Nuestro Cuerpo: Agua y Aire 
Our blood, tears and sweat are earth’s waters, internalized. Our breath is simply sky travelling through us, into each cell. In the Rhythm of Chaos we’ll explore ourselves as water on the move, flooding and falling. In the Rhythm of Lyrical we’ll ride the air within us as a condor rides an updraft.

Nuestro Cuerpo: Respiración y Espacio
Between our cells, and within each one, is pure space. Between each breath is a pause of emptiness. We are not completely full and solid. We are also made of free space. We’ll use the 5Rhythms to find ourselves in Stillness: to dance in the open space between elements, in the space that contains everything.

La Sal de la Tierra/Salt of the Earth
What are we, if not planet Earth? Do we sometimes imagine or feel that we might not belong, or that we have an existence that is separate from Earth and other beings? No matter our names, cultures, languages, borders, or circumstances, the only reason we were born at all is because we were each, already, part of the life of Earth. It’s a fact so obvious that we lose it sometimes, in the wildly changing, stimulating, and challenging world we inhabit.
We are the Earth, and that’s not a metaphor. The substances in the water my great-grandmother drank are in my cells. The same is true of you: all elements of nature, and everything your ancestors took in, did, and felt literally became your bones, flesh, fluids, breath, and life-force.
We can explore our personal and collective cellular connection with the planet, elements, and our fellow beings through movement and awareness. Let’s see what we find in the salt of our sweat, the earth of our bodies, our hearts’ pulses, and the unpredictable dance of our humanity.
January 25, 2020, Lima, Peru

December Devotion
Boxing Day 2019 brought a new moon and a solar eclipse: the moon moved between earth and sun. The following evening brought us together to dance. Accompanied by the living music of April and Éric with drums, percussion, and voice, It was a potent moment for saying goodbye to the past and hello to the present.  With devotion - gentle steadiness of attention and ritual follow-through - we danced as a letting go of what has been and allowing of awareness of what may be.
December 27, 2019, Nanaimo

All Souls Dance
This was a deeply-felt seasonal immersion in movement. We called on the qualities of the human soul to step forward and acknowledge the valley under the mountain where we dance, all its ancestral streams, all its waters, forests, plants, animals, and webs of human relations. Many of us consciously stepped into the risk of embodying authentic facets of soul that may not have been seen before. We held a space for all souls, in acceptance, activation, creative expression and celebration, and the intention of balming of generations here, gone, and yet to come.
October 31, 2019, Duncan

Follow Your Feet
Between the head and feet of any given person is a billion miles of unexplored wilderness. I yearned to know what was going on in that wilderness, not only in me, but in everyone else as well. And so, movement became both my medicine and my meditation. Having found and healed myself in its wild embrace, I became a mapmaker for others to follow, but not in my footsteps, in their own.
~ Gabrielle Roth
September 27, 2019, Nanaimo

Migration
Our weekly Thursday-night dancing community welcomed back Chris Bertin's live instrumentation woven with my deejayed soundscape, to mark the turn to autumn. And we took it outside, dancing into the darkness in St. Ann's Garden, on the grass in the shelter of a beautiful tree. We fell into the drum's pulse, the didjeridu's rumble and roll, and with our dancing feet honoured our planet,  Pi'paam (Mount Tzouhalem), and the Quw’utsun’ territory in which we live. A portion of the nights proceeds were donated to youth-led activism for global climate action.
​Thursday Sept. 26, Duncan
https://www.facebook.com/pg/EarthGuardiansCowichanValley/about/?ref=page_internal
https://www.earthguardians.org

Soul Sojourn 
A mini-workshop, created with Chris Bertin, paying tribute to Pi'paam (also called Mount Tzouhalem) in whose shadow we have the privilege to dance every week, and the traditional lands of the Quw'utsun Mutiimuhw.  By dancing together on a floor that is also the earth, and rumbling our drums and didjeridu into the ground, and reaching our souls in the direction of the eagles and ravens who love to cruise the thermals created by the mountain's warmth, we gave our respect to this place.
​May 30, 2019, Duncan

Feet on Earth Hands on Drum Heart on Sleeve
This mini-workshop, created with Chris Bertin, called our attention to human heart, brilliance, and fortitude, looking and dancing in the direction of Mother Africa. The anniversaries of the election of Mandela's first post-Apartheid government in South Africa and the beginning of the Rwandan genocide, combined with the ongoing global victories and struggles of all Africa's peoples, accompanied us through dance, drum, and spirit of UBUNTU: I am because we are.
​April 25, 2019, Duncan

Break Through
An evening of springing to life through dance, in beautiful harbourside Nanaimo. Our movement was gracefully supported by creative hang-drum and vocals from event organizer, community builder and dancer April Laurie.
​March 29, 2019, Nanaimo

Rite of Spring
A mini-workshop honouring the spring equinox, supported by the powerful intuitive drumming of Éric Boucher.
March 21, 2019, Duncan

Enter
We'll use the natural, welcoming process of the 5Rhythms Wave to re-introduce ourselves to ourselves, enter the present moment, and also gently mark our entrance to this newborn year, 2019. Each of the five rhythms contains vast teachings. We'll enter each in turn with simplicity and curiosity, as if stepping from the shores of a stream into the gentle current of the water. Our bodies will be our gateway: 1. we'll breathe and notice our breathing; 2. we'll actively feel our own body as a whole and in its parts; 3. we'll allow movement to arise from our attention to our breathing, sensing bodies... and repeat. Entering, entering, entering... 
January 19, 2019, Thetis Island 

​Holy
​A last, mindful dance through the Wave before New Year's. Tuning in enough... being in the moment enough... becoming honest enough to learn to create good beginnings, middles, and endings. This is a strong teaching of the art and practice of 5Rhythms.
Come dance in the pause between years. Who knows how we will find ourselves, that night? Let's enter the ending - about to become another beginning - but not quite yet. Let's move and breathe in that space.
December 28, 2018, Nanaimo

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​Regenerate
A month before 2018's end, let's dive inward. Free-form movement and gentle guidance through the 5Rhythms will be the ground for this month's conscious dance at OmTown.
​November 30, 2018, ​Nanaimo

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​Just Trust
In our culture TRUST is often imagined as a lofty, vague ideal or a naive illusion extended toward stuff found outside ourselves. Both of these cultural attitudes are incomplete, and lead us away from what is seriously trustworthy: the processes of life itself, our own bodies and instincts, our connection and intuition, our authentic creative responses and inspiration, and our honest reflection and integration.

5RHYTHMS embraces these deeper realities by helping us feel, allow and simply move with what’s really going on. When we can sense and engage with what’s happening right here and now, we grow our capacity to perceive clearly, TRUST what we find, and relate to others and the world from a place of greater self-knowledge. 5RHYTHMS practice invokes the way all things arise, take form, intensify and change, come to a new resolution, and die away. We’ll use the Rhythms to activate, explore, and TRUST ourselves in the natural life-process of our dance.

Waves-level practice is the foundation of the 5RHYTHMS dancing path. We engage the fundamental method of embodiment: feeling the ground, our bodies and our breath. We offer ourselves to be danced and moved. We invite energy to circulate through us in wave form, and we spontaneously follow our process.
April 27-29, 2018, Kelowna

Unfurl
​Come move, through the gateway of 5Rhythms dance, into the birth-moments of spring. Chris Bertin brings his intuitive, sensitive, and activating live music and care for the dancers. Chantell Foss brings encouragement from the heart to move as you are called, with catalytic guidance and care for the dancers.
March 22, 2018, Duncan

Into Mystery
Chantell Foss and Chris Bertin join to open a portal into the beautiful darkness of the longest night of the year. Chris, a long-time weaver of musical webs,  brings an organic, responsive soundscape. Chantell, passionate about the healing mysteries of the huge dark spaces within and the co-creative miracles of community spaces without, will hold a free-dive, group-exploration 5Rhythms dance.
December 21, 2017, Duncan

Can You Love Some More?
Cultivate your power to stay with yourself with heart - or at least with crumbs of compassion and tastes of tenderness - through gateways that appear as you move along in the dance (as in life).
December 3, 2017, Duncan

Cost Of Freedom
Dance dimensions of your own freedom, in whatever circumstances life happens to be serving up, for you. With permission to totally go for it and unfetter ourselves, we'll commit to our moving process with a dash of discipline, so we can be present to see what's on the other side.
November 12, 2017, Duncan

Answer is Within
Set foot in your inner landscape. Explore new pathways, and wander trusty old ones.  
Listen gently but intently to this changing world within, and express what is heard.
October 1, 2017, Duncan

Compass
An intrepid, reflective wayfinding weekend
March 17-19, 2017, Kelowna

One
3-hour immersion in the Rhythm of Stillness, and an exploration of our connection to Spirit, or in other words: all that is.
March 5, 2017, Duncan

Balance
3-hour immersion in the Rhythm of Flowing, and an exploration of the body on the earth.
September 18, 2016, Duncan