Common Ground: A 5Rhythms Dance, Mindfulness and Art Celebration

Lucia Horan and Douglas Drummond with Guest Musicians Sanga of the Valley and Nick Ayers, Guest Artist Tracy Powell, and Guest Speaker Renee Lertzman

Spring brings renewal to our lands. After the isolating winter chill, it is time to expand, bloom, and gather in community. During this full moon week, including Earth Day, we’ll celebrate with a campus-wide event that will weave together our most potent offerings: the 5Rhythms® dance, mindfulness, meditation, and art!

Together, we’ll honor our common ground as living beings and our interconnection with Mother Earth. We will dance in nature and be danced through the 5Rhythms, Gabrielle Roth’s map of the earth’s primary energies and their movement through our bodies and in the world around us. Working with this system helps us to attune and align with ourselves, one another, and the earth. Dance supports neuroplasticity and uses the body’s intelligence to help us experience reality in a more balanced and healthy way.

We will be accompanied by world-famous musicians Sanga of the Valley and Nick Aryes. With Tracy Powell, our artist-in-residence, you will bring into being a series of community-made, “created in nature” pieces. In addition, TED speaker and environmental psychologist Renee Lertzman will discuss the importance of “attunement” with the environment and how to inspire and create a better future.

This course will include:

5Rhythms dance at inside and outside venues, by daylight and moonlight

Creating art in nature

Trauma-sensitive mindfulness, including a Dharma talk, sitting and walking meditations

Group sharing circles, optional groups for men and women’s circles

Live music and recorded music

In this fiercely changing landscape, some may feel emotionally called to grieve or may be disconnected and numb from all that is happening. These practices will offer a pathway into conversation with the natural forces. In the splendor of nature, we will celebrate the gift of life on this Earth. Join us for a week of celebration of the Earth and our bodies!

Recommended Reading: Sweat Your Prayers by Gabrielle Roth, Maps to Ecstasy by Gabrielle Roth, Connections by Gabrielle Roth, Dancing with the Dharma Edited by Harrison Blum

Breath In Motion

Notes from the theatre wing:

The beauty of our 5R practice from a theatre prospective is having the opportunity to reflect life, absorbing every morsel of its offering and gifting it back to the dance over and over again.

In living this practice as artists we embody the rhythms through every breath we take, through every offering we make. Each gesture being an extension from our body, heart, mind, soul and spirit. A POETIC landscape of offering. A free fall, a footfall, a live response to what is happening in us around us and universally.

As artists we manifest change offering ourselves and our stories from that Live Wire place deep inside our creative centre; that ELECTRIC landscape of unpredictable possibility that lives and breathes inside our bones.

Evoking a creative way of seeing and experiencing life from the artistic nature of the body is the place I want to live and breathe in and out of forever.

I’ll meet you here with all my heart and soul. 

Lorca