Carrying my shoes and my bag, I pushed the double doors and walked into a huge empty room; a dance studio. The walls were painted white and curtains covered a huge floor to ceiling mirror. Moments earlier I had caught a glimpse of a ballet class through a classroom window; women were contorting themselves into what appeared to be incredibly uncomfortable positions. I was feeling uncomfortable: I was at the London Contemporary Dance School.
I put my shoes and my bag down and looked around. There were around twenty people of varying ages. The youngest must have been around twenty five; the eldest seventy five. Three quarters of the group were women. I wanted to leave.
Fifteen minutes earlier, I met everyone in a pub. ‘So, what is BioDanza?’ I asked Iris, who was also a member of the London Spirituality group. ‘I’ve just seen the title of this event, I don’t know anything about it.’ Iris started to chuckle.
‘It’s like a scientific form of movement’.
‘Scientific?’
‘It’s formed from a set of principles. There are levels to it. You can get deep into the philosophy if you want, or you can just go with the music, move around and have a good time. It’s up to you. It’s based around the idea of musical semantics’.
‘Musical semantics?’
‘Different types of music gives us different feelings. All the music that you’ll hear today has been chosen to lead us to different kinds of movements and get us to different emotional states’.
Before going to the event, I managed to do a tiny amount of research. I had read words about integrating mind, body and spirit. I was worried: was BioDanza a cult? Was it a weird wealth generation scheme for those who were ‘in the know’?
‘Okay everyone. Make a big circle and hold hands. When I start the music, start moving to your right’. I blinked. It was our facilitator, Nina. I walked to the corner of the dance room and found myself next to a chap who was a similar age to me and a fascinatingly tall French woman called Lilly who was in her early twenties. Nina turned on the music. It was ‘All You Need is Love’ by The Beatles.
The circle began to move, rapidly speeding up. ‘Slower...’ warned Nina, but her instruction had no discernible effect; the rhythm and sentiment of The Beatles song was infectious: our circle had acquired a momentum all of its own. It was hard to keep hold of Lilly’s hand; she was tugging my arm up and down in time to the music.
At the end of the track, we stopped rotating and were given a new instruction: ‘what I want you to do is walk in time with the music. I want you to march. March in any direction you want, and when you pass someone, make sure you make eye contact; you can make a gesture, like this’. Nina demonstrated by throwing her arms apart and showing her palms in a welcoming jazz-hands gesture.
Nina started the music again and everyone marched everywhere at the same time; some crossed the room, some went clockwise, some anti-clockwise. We looked into each other’s eyes and threw out our arms in recognition that we were passing a fellow marcher. Everyone passed in a hectic blur of smiles and gestures. I soon became aware that I was ‘messing about’. My ‘march’ wasn’t as serious or as determined as the other marchers. I concentrated on marching sensibly and stopped my flailing disco arms.
For the next exercise we were split into three groups; three circles of seven. New music was started and our smaller circles started to rotate. ‘At any point, when the feeling takes you, move from one circle to another, touching the hands of the other people, so you can join a new circle’. It was weird, but fun. There was perpetual surprise when someone left one group and joined another. By this point, we were all getting a bit out of breath.
‘We’re going to do something about colours. I’m going to shout out a colour, and you go and find the person who is wearing that colour and you give them a shoulder massage’ I preferred the circle dancing. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. New music started. When the colour ‘blue’ was announced, I was pounced on by four women, because I was wearing a blue shirt. I was given another shoulder massage moments later because I was wearing a pair of grey trousers.
The next bit stretched my tolerance for the bizarre: ‘I’m going to shout out a part of the body, and what you’ve got to do is go over to the closest person, and dance, whilst touching that part of body of the other person’
It was then time do some ‘mirroring’. One person danced, and the other person copied, and then we swapped roles. ‘This is where the science bit comes in’, said Nina. ‘When you mirror, you have to think about new ways of movement, and this helps us all to create new neural pathways in our brain; it’s all about neuroscience’.
We then did ‘dancing in pairs’ to newer faster music. For this part of the evening, opposite sex dancing was encouraged, mainly to balance our ‘yin’ and our ‘yang’. We danced whilst holding hands, before moving onto a new partner. I started to enjoy myself. I kept meeting Lilly and Iris who were both wearing huge grins. I was wearing one too.
It was then time to sit down and recover for a bit. Nina put on a classical waltz.
‘In this bit, you learn to be free. To make a bit more space, half of us are going to do it and the other half are going to sit down and watch. I’ll just show you what to do’.
Nina stepped into the middle of the dance floor, flapped her arms like a bird and did some neat turns, making it all up. ‘Can we have all the people who have been here before?’ Half the group stood up and took a space on the dance floor. Nina started the music. Everyone lurched, and turned and flapped, and spun. I tried to pick out Iris and Lilly amidst the dancing tumult. Whenever I found them, my sight of them was immediately occluded by another lurching and flapping dancer.
Then it was my go. I felt like an idiot, but I didn’t care.
Nina had two more things in store for us. Nina put on a gentle lilting pop song: it was time for the group hug. We all gathered in a small circle, and put our arms around our neighbour. The regulars had closed their eyes, trying to find some peace and tranquillity, whereas the newbies where looking around, all bug eyed, sharing expressions of uncomfortable bafflement. The circle started to sway in time to the music whilst the track went on for a very uncomfortable three minutes. At the end of the track, the circle dissolved.
Nina then put on a faster track, and we were encouraged to give an individual hug to every single member of the group. I gave and received twenty hugs. When all the hugging was done, we messed around, doing some more ‘dance marching’, jazz hands and offering eye contact.
When this final track came to an end, everyone clapped. It was time to go to the pub. I liked Biodanza.
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