This text was featured in my September 2018 newsletter. As many dancers haven’t seen it and I believe it’s important for clarification and understanding of my current and future work, I’m posting it here (with a few edits).
✨ This autumn marks the 20th anniversary of the first 5Rhythms workshop I ever attended. On April 17th 2011, I became a 5Rhythms teacher, sitting in a circle with 80 other fellow travellers, on a dancefloor where all the 5Rhythms teachers have been initiated, hundreds of them before us.
I still get goosebumps remembering that feeling of support, understanding that absolutely all the dance teachers I’ve learned from have just like me, sat in that dance hall, feeling the threshold between being “just” a dancer and a teacher. I remember the moment when I received my necklace as the acknowledgment of the journey I went through, of the hundreds and hundreds of hours danced, cried, lived through and integrated on the dancefloors in Paris, Swiss Alps or Manhattan.
The person who gave me my teachers’ necklace addressed me as a «roots-woman», referring to something I’ve shared in a workshop a few years before, regarding my growing up without roots and support, which taught me not to search for my roots in a country, nation ot a family.
None of us knew that we were the last circle of teachers that Gabrielle sent off into the wide world. I didn’t know that my next big teaching would be not to look for my roots in the 5Rhythms either.
This year, exactly 7 years after the ceremony, I made a decision to teach the 5Rhythms only in a very limited number of workshops. There are too many reasons to be named here but none of them is connected to the Rhythms themselves. I still believe it’s the deepest, simplest and the most meaningful map I’ve ever experienced. All the other dance methods I’ve tried, no matter how interesting or useful they seemed to be, always proved to be either too weak or too simplified or too burdened by ego-trips.
5Rhythms were like a teaching that all of the paintings and landscapes in the world can be deduced to a few basic colours, that all the music in the world is created by a few notes only and that millions of books have been written with a few dozen letters. It was a teaching of simplifying without banalising. As if someone had discovered what I needed to discover and spared me from decades of searching.
What does this decision actually mean? This year I will lead the 5Rhythms very rarely (possibly never) and you will always be able to see in the workshops’ description if we will work with the 5R map or not. If I start missing the Rhythms, I will return to them.
If your interest lies in learning and practicing the 5Rhythms method, it might be a good idea to find a different teacher who holds regular 5Rhythms workshop. If you’re interested in self-exploration primarily through dance and movement, but also through therapy and other methods, you’re in the right place!
What will these “new” workshops look like?
I don’t know.
At the beginning, probably similar to the way I usually work, but soon enough my flow will take me in new directions 🙂
I’m allowing my roots to spread where they’re used to grow. Where there is no family, tribe nor support. And at the same time, I feel each and every one of my teachers holding my back so strongly, feeling them in my words and my dance. The 5Rhythms will always shine through everything that I do because I danced with them for half of my life.
I’m 42. I know quite a bit. I don’t know a whole lot more. I want to combine freely everything that I’ve learned so far, I want to grow more. I don’t want to create my own method, I don’t want to impress any authorities and prove my self to surrogate mommies and daddies. I want to play. I want to not-know. I want my roots to find their own way again. They’ve guided me brilliantly so far and I’m grateful for that, I love where we have arrived.
Thank you all for everything we’ve shared together and I do hope our roots will intertwine in the next dance season as well.
E.