Overview
5Rhythms is a conscious dance / authentic movement practice. Some people treat it as a spiritual practice.
From the outside it looks like people flopping around to a DJ set, but there’s more to it than that. There is a single instruction: let your body move the way it wants to. You cannot do this wrong: anything you do is by definition the thing that’s arising for you at that moment.
The creator, Gabrielle Roth, watched a bunch of people doing emotionally transformative dances and noticed patterns in their movement, then systematized them. These are the five “rhythms”.
The rhythms, in order, are:
- Flowing: grounded in feet, spiralling, in-breath, connecting to your body
- Staccato: hips, elbows, sharp, punchy outward movements, out-breath
- Chaos: let head go, shaking, trembling, floppy, repetitive motions
- Lyrical: led by your hands and fingers, light, floaty
- Stillness: internal, taking shapes / poses, breath
You don’t have to care about the specifics of these too much. The instructor will usually demo them at the beginning of the class, but the music will pull you through; everyone expresses differently anyway.
One set is called a “wave”, and it feels like a whole goddamn journey. It’s usually about an hour.
Going deeper
5Rhythms has ways of interpreting the rhythms that it calls “maps”. The body-based one i outlined above is called Waves. There are others:
The Heartbeat map corresponds rhythms to emotions: flowing is fear, staccato is anger, chaos is sadness, lyrical is joy, stillness is compassion.
In Cycles, it’s life stages: birth, childhood, puberty, maturity, death.
In Mirrors, it’s ego work (i think): being, loving, knowing, seeing, healing.
There’s also Silver Desert and God, Sex & The Body which are waaay far along what they call “the dancing path”.
My sense here is that the practice is somatic therapy, disguised as dance. Given this, I’m pleased to report that teacher accreditation is hella onerous: you have to do 3 years of practice, 300h of classes, 55 days of workshops before even being allowed to start training.
Logistics
5Rhythms is pretty global - if you live in a decent sized city there’s probably a weekly or monthly drop-in class. These will always be doing the “Waves” map; the other maps are taught in weekend or even week-long workshops, often with other workshops as prerequisites.
An average drop-in class will be some warmup / getting-settled time, the instructor intro-ing the practice, and a one hour wave. The practice is primarily inwardly focused: instructors will sometimes invite the group to “let your feet find someone else’s feet” and see what arises; but in my experience, the majority of people ignore this invitation and stay focused inward.
I am still a newbie - only been dancing 3 months - but I have taken to it very quickly. It aligns with my expression and i’ve opened up and become more myself quite rapidly because of it. I’ve discovered it’s teaching me the same things i learned in my zen practice, but in my body.
If you think you might enjoy moving your body around unhindered, with nobody judging you and no way to get it wrong, I recommend checking it out. The 5Rhythms website has a pretty good class finder.