I am very interested in how dancing can help me attain a state of meditation that I can only describe as a conscious trance. I don't always find that state as a result of the wave (the Five Rhythms flow of music), or I may only enter it partially, but I do find I can achieve it more and more frequently after 3 years of practicing ecstatic dance.
Some would call this trance dance but when I was younger and attended trance dance raves, I would experience the crowd as moving towards an unconscious state, not a higher consciousness. It was full of Freud's libidinal energy that I talked about in my last post. Looking back, I would now say I - and perhaps the others dancing with me - we were emptying our minds to a state of nothingness, just a living body moving to rhythm. Emptying is a common term when we think of meditation. I am not saying what we did was a bad thing, it just isn't what I am practicing now when I move with an engaged imaginative mind. Or perhaps what ecopsychologist Laura Sewell called the 5th skill of ecological perception - the intentional use of imagination.
I went looking recently for some video clips that might capture a visual of this process. I started with Western yoga trance dance as it is often seen as related to ecstatic dance. Here is a link to American Shiva Rea's "liberation dance", much like Gabriel Roth's Five Rhythms videos.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=boFGjvtmxEk&feature=fvwrel
Rea has built onto her career in yoga, expanding into dance. When I watch her videos, I notice some similarity to our practice but like Roth, she chooses to film beautiful, young, able-bodied dancers on a white sand beach in order to market her product and so the movement takes on the inevitable aura of being staged for the camera. But when she says she is "dancing for healing, dancing for life, dancing for truth", I have to admit we share a common goal.
Then there is Osho's Dynamic Meditation, a cathartic method designed for Westerners who have difficulty meditating but that avoids the pitfalls of Latihan. His method also uses dance but he encourages the practitioner to avoid rhythm in the early stages of the practice. Instead of trying to watch the mind, Osho says "throw out your garbage rather than wasting time in watching it" and so movement/dance clears away the debris so that one can meditate. This clip shows someone moving through all 5 phases of the program.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5Ao--mbIho
One more. Check out this voodoo dancing from Togo, in still photography. These images by Alan Tobey from 2008 capture the inner world of the dancer without us actually knowing what they are seeing in their imaginative minds. The dancers seem unconcerned about how their dance "looks".
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b17j9zpR_M
I will post more about voodoo dance later.
