In the first chapter of his Danser sa vie, Roger Garaudy traces a spirituality of dance which is a spirituality of life. He quotes Ananda Coomaraswamy extensively with reference to the unity between human beings and nature/cosmos, which dance represents and enacts:
Within this expression of the organic unity of human beings and nature, India made of Shiva’s dance the clearest image of God’s activity… Our God — an ancient sacred Indian hymn spells out — is a dancing God which, like the heat of the fire enveloping the wood, irradiates its power in both spirit and matter, sweeping them away in the dance.*
Shiva’s dance is cosmic as it expresses the five divine actions with relation to the universe: creation, conservation, destruction, rebirth (reincarnation), and ultimate freedom. Summarizing Coomaraswamy, Garaudy writes:
Shiva’s dance is the image of the rhythmic interplay which is the source of all movement of being; moreover, it liberates the unlimited human being from the illusion to be an individual enclosed within the confines of their skin, as their body and being is the whole universe; finally, the “place” of the dance, the center of the universe, is the heart of each human being.
All of this might sound too abstract and philosophical to those of us who are oriented more toward the concrete and the practical or toward the poetic and the soulful. In such a case, the following quote from Garaudy might help:
Dance reveals that the sacred is also fleshy and that the body may teach what a disincarnated spirit does not know: the beauty and the grandeur of the act whereby the human being is not divided within but fully present to what she is doing. We grasp such enrichment of life when dance exercises upon us the same fascination as the sea, as the clouds, as fire or love.
Garaudy enriches his discourse on dance through his Marxist analysis of modern civilization, especially the notion of alienation. We are beset by a mix of exhaustion (as our labor is exploited) and artificial separation from nature (due to technology). Thus, it becomes more and more difficult for us to organize our life around conscious aims giving us a correct sense of ourselves and our importance, and this is why the precursors of modern dance have oriented themselves instinctively toward the body.
Modern dance, through its great representatives from Isadora Duncan to Ruth Saint-Denis and Ted Shawn, from Martha Graham to Merce Cunningham and Maurice Bèjart, is a profound spiritual initiative oriented toward a veritable redemption of contemporary society.
Giving back to human beings a sense of their body as the locale of our ties and our potency, as the receptacle of the real world through our senses, as a projection toward a possible world through action, this is how modern dance contributed to give back to people their identity. The getting back of lost dimensions [of humanity] thus began and could not be otherwise: eroticizing our total relationship with the world and giving a style to our body’s movements and our life, awakening in us the desire that our whole being express itself by expressing the world.
This is quite a task for modern dance, which, after all, is mostly experienced as a spectacle on a stage. But for Garaudy, professional dancers are just the avant-garde of a new civilization, clearly.
*All quotes from Roger Garaudy, Danser sa vie (Dancing One’s Life). Available for free borrowing through the Online Library.
Banner Image: “Sunset celebration” Photo by Levi Guzman on Unsplash.
Queries for Contemplation
In your specific context, what role can dance play in the recovery of the full human potential of yourself and others?
Related Readings by Matthew Fox
Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality
WHEE! We, wee All the Way Home: A Guide to Sensual Prophetic Spirituality
One River, Many Wells: Wisdom Springing from Global Faiths
The Reinvention of Work: A New Vision of Livelihood For Our Time
The Coming of the Cosmic Christ: The Healing of Mother Earth and the Birth of a Global Renaissance
Creation Spirituality: Liberating Gifts for the Peoples of the Earth
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society
6 thoughts on “Dancing as a Way of Life – part 2”
“Dance? Did you say dance? Come on, my boy!” If all of us who read this Daily Meditation heeded Zorba’s call and would dance, even for only a few minutes, today, and tomorrow, and the day after, and thus doubled our DM with a DD every day thereafter, a quantum of beauty and joy would be added to our planet. I never forgot Nietzsche’s conditional profession of faith: “I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity – through him all things fall.” To all the solemn gods, Shiva is indeed a heavenly Zorba.
In my elderly body I’m still aware of the Divine Flow of Love Healing Peace Freedom Creativity Beauty Joy Compassion… running through me connecting me to All Diverse Loving Co-Creation Oneness in the Sacred Process of the Eternal Present Moment…
The comedian Tim Conway made audiences laugh by exaggerating the stooped shuffling walk of a nearly bald “old timer,” with slurred speech to signify mental decline. As a nonagenarian myself, who has seen many of my contemporaries in a nursing home, I say being old and infirm are not laughing matters. I’ve recently visited a 101-year-old man who with his elderly spouse laugh and smile often. Religious faith can strengthen anyone who recognizes that we all are vulnerable and mortal. Easter speaks a profound paradox, which can provoke our laughter at the absurdity that what dies is born to fuller life, more beautiful and wonderful than before.
Homily for Sunday of JazzFest
Come to these fair grounds of music
holy to the Lord of the Dance
flying a rainbow
with the Sun & the Earth
spanned by the wings
of peace.
Come dancing —
music is prayer;
to dance is to pray.
Thus saith the Lord:
If your butt don’t feel like wriggling,
you ain’t listening to the music.
~ Rafael Jesús González
Oh, dance! That fraught subject.
I’m of mixed feelings about dance in our society. On the one hand, it CAN be a spiritual exploration. But it has a lot of problems. People like Isadora Duncan taught dance in a highly competitive and extremely physically demanding/punishing way, to a select few dancers. THEY got to dance their spirituality (if they chose). Everyone else got to sit and watch. Spirituality-through-dance was a specialized action reserved for a very few. And I’m not sure how many dancers saw themselves as “cosmic-earth inter-players.”
Maybe some people, in private, dance to the rhythm of the earth and cosmos. I don’t know. (I myself am almost deaf and have vertigo, both from Menieres, so such movement is off limits for me). But I do see a role for dance.
My vantage point is cosmic-“down/wide” rather than physical-“up”, so I see this as a broader issue, a whole-human, whole-cosmos issue (see the Mystical texts I’ve written, in the archives, if you want to know more about this viewpoint). If people want to go beyond their very limited, self-focused preoccupation, COMMUNAL dance is one very tried-and-true way to accomplish this. It goes back into pre-history, and that’s for a reason.
It works.
Thank you for these wonderful meditations on dance.
It has been my honor to bring folks together in a sacred circle of dance. I trained at Findhorn in Scotland and from there have traveled the world keeping the joy of dancing in community alive.
The Sacred/Circle Dances I carry are a collection of traditional dances and contemporary choreographies which work on many levels to create community through celebration and devotion. When we join hands and dance these simple repetitive dancing mantras in circles, lines and spirals, a blessing descends, energy is activated and with intention our dancing becomes a spiritual practice that transforms and heals self, others, our living planet. I believe the original impulse to dance came from a deep desire to connect with divine mystery and this impulse is encoded in our DNA. These simple dances activate this coded message, we remember.
It is a thrill to dance a spiral of hundreds of people at the Cosmic Masses. Truly a cosmic experience.
This dance is for everyone. The circle will hold us until we are all dancing together. There are no mistakes just variations. I invite folks to bring their life experience, curiosity and desire to explore these simple and timeless dances passed on by diverse cultures from around the world. We meet the ‘other’ in music and dance.
“Sacred Circle Dance brings people together, it heals, unifies, transcends…it can change the world.”
For more information:
dancingspiral@aol.com