My experience at a local ecstatic dance
I’ll caveat this by saying that this was my first (and so far only) ecstatic dance experience. Any number of things could be happening here: I could be very guarded; this could have indeed been a weird day for the event; maybe my local scene has strange vibes; etc etc. I can’t know with n=1, but I can share my experience and compare to my usual 5Rhythms practice.
In short: the energy was extremely off.
The class started with ground rules, a cacao ceremony, and then a contact improv warmup. We were already sitting in a big circle for the cacao ceremony, and were instructed to crawl on our hands and knees toward the center of the circle.
There were clearly some experienced contact improv people there who knew each other because they started hurling their bodies at each other: rubbing, twisting, writhing. Imagine a lot of snakes. The instructions continued: maybe brush up against someone… maybe make animal noises.
I noped out of there to the “no thank you leave me alone” area to one side, which I was very grateful for. There were wristbands you could wear to explicitly indicate “I want to dance alone”; I went to get one.
The contact improv wound up and the main dance began. The DJ said she’d planned the set to have two peaks; it ramped up fairly quickly.
The group as a whole didn’t seem to cohere. There were little pockets of people: many twos dancing together.
Sometimes a group of four or five would form, and all start mirroring each other, which felt forced - watching from the outside, it felt like an attempt at an incantation: like a group of high schoolers found a copy of the Necronomicon and tried to do a spell but nobody could read Latin and everyone was an amateur.
There was prowling. Over the course of the night, I saw a man and woman dancing together: high intensity, very charged, very sexual, and also very bad vibes. The thing that struck me the most was that the guy seemed enamoured with his own power: doing poses, making snake charmer gestures while the woman was on her knees in front of him. It’s possible to imagine a version of this happening that feels sexy and fun, but that was not what I felt as an observer - it felt pretty dark. There were times where he turned away and her body language changed to hunched, closed, vulnerable; it was disturbing to watch.
I spent some time trying to get into the groove and mostly found I couldn’t - there were brief moments where I could, but I was shields up almost the entire time. I was grateful for it once I noticed - clearly my body was trying to tell me something, and once I realized I felt more safe to play in my little bubble.
The room felt like there were these blobs of color - lumps of differently colored Play-Doh - and people were mashing them together, mid grays smearing into pale blues, pockets of orange getting totally surrounded. Towards the end about a third of the room congealed into a blob into the center, collectively rubbing against each other.
The impression I got was one of hollow wanting - a desire for contact, but missing the intimacy and mutual sensing. There were a few of us standing off to the side at the end, and I wanted to sidle up to them and ask “are you seeing this too?”.
I spoke to a couple of people afterward who said the vibe was weird that day. As I said up top, I don’t know if it was a one-off, or if this is normal; there was some speculation that the contact improv warmup might have set a weird tone.
Comparing with 5Rhythms
Literally the next day I went to my usual 5Rhythms dance and the group cohered well; someone even mentioned at the closeout that movements rippled around the dancefloor.
I’m speculating, but I think the difference is that the 5Rhythms practice starts internally focused; the first rhythm, Flowing, is all about internal sensing, finding where your body is in that moment. The earliest point I’ve ever heard instructors suggest finding a partner is in the second rhythm, Staccato, which is about outward expression and is thus relational; in my experience, these dances tend to look like two people facing each other, almost like a dance battle!
Am I just energetically closed?
It’s easy to ask if I’m just energetically closed off - I certainly wondered that at the ecstatic dance.
If what I was seeing at ecstatic dance is how we define energetic openness, then I don’t want to be energetically open. I once got flooded giving a shoulder massage because I picked up on a complicated layered sadness just from touch. I’d rather slowly build energetic rapport; once we’re both grounded, centered in ourselves we can see what happens in the space between us.
In my experience, this is entirely possible. A number of times at 5Rhythms I’ve ended up, fairly spontaneously, doing some high contact, sensual dancing with another person - lots of body contact, weight shifting, embracing - including with someone I hadn’t met before and didn’t know their name until afterwards.
I have also ended up dancing with someone that felt erotic and extremely sexually charged, without us even touching at all. So I feel comfortable saying it’s not that I’m a closed-off prude uncomfortable with human contact.
It seems noteworthy that all the times I’ve ended up doing high-touch dancing with people at 5Rhythms has been in the Lyrical rhythm, after everyone has worked out their stuff in Chaos and are feeling more spacious and in the world.
These dances have felt exquisitely attuned, feeling out what wants to unfold next, going slow when we’re unsure; importantly, it feels like both people have been attending to what is arising, rather than requesting or negotiating; the question felt more like “what is to be danced now?” rather than “can I / shall we / what do you want?”.
“Wanting” energy vs “arising”
I think part of what turned me off at ecstatic dance is what I call “wanting” energy. I saw smiles on faces but it felt like there was a hollow emptiness behind them.
It’s this energy of desire, of hunger, of seeking, of looking for something particular in the world.
And this is something I struggle with! I did a 3-day 5Rhythms workshop in March, and at one point partway through the second day I caught myself wanting to dance with others and not quite being able to make the connection. And I thought to myself: I have to want to dance on my own just as much as dancing with others.
Immediately afterwards i realized: that’s not possible – I feel however I feel in the moment and I can’t control that. All I could do was accept how I’m feeling and dance through / with it.
Over the course of the workshop, as I got more and more comfortable focusing on the present moment, the hungry, extractive, searching-for-connection energy subsided. By the last day, something had transformed in both myself and the group: I’d turn around, make eye contact with someone, we’d both grin, and then something would arise that was uniquely ours, mutually discovered and unfolding. Then it’d come to a natural end, I’d turn around, and the situation would repeat - over and over. It felt really wonderful, but what it didn’t feel like was something I was searching for or trying to control. It just happened on its own.
I think this “just happening” - the arising - is important. In order for it to happen, you can’t be trying to control the world, energetically leaning out of your body, searching or reaching for something to happen. You have to be centered in yourself, open but not desirous. And when you do make contact, it feels like attunement, a deep listening.