DANCE AS HEALING 

WITH FERNANDO ARTIGA (Be-longing )

How our deepest dreams and interests attract to our path

the most beautiful and meaningful connections,

to learn from, to explore, to play, to grow, to reflect and to share. 

It was 2012 when I attended for the first time
to Lighting in the Bottle Festival,

an amazing gathering of creativity and art, music,
yoga and performance, a fairy world lived
by unreal creatures surrounded by love and high frequencies.

Three days of the best eclectic music, motivational speakers,
life coaches, yoga…. 

my big discovery of the weekend was Lucent Dossier (Lucent Dossier )

When I saw them on stage performing a combination of Kabuki
and burlesque circus with the super loud dubstep music,

every single pore of my skin was awake
and absorbing the impressive gift of emotions, 

I could appreciate the reminiscences of Kagura dancing 
present in every character, 

as since 10th century has been considered the “God - Entertainment “,

I felt as a Goddess  being entertained by the most refined

Shinto performance, 

elevated to a transcendental stage of excitement. 

 “Oracular divination “ and “spirit pacification”
 are characteristics of Noh dance,

where a skill or talent is developed by a supernatural being transformed

into a human/hero, integrating masks, costumes, dance, and performance; 

emotions conveyed stylized, conventional gestures and 

iconic masks representing roles such as ghosts, women, hobgoblins, old people, etc.

When I was a kid, six years old, if you ask me what I wanted to be
as a grown up, my answer was: a trapeze artist!

 I loved the life in the circus and being a nomad, 

all the romantic and intense relationships between the circus family,

......but my parents wanted me to be

a lawyer and I, as a rebel, studied political sciences. lol

Time passed by and because of not really taking the right decisions 

or just because life turns into something we didn’t plan or 

get a little bit more hectic to what we expected it was gonna be,

I never got to go to any of the classes that one of Lucent Dossier's members
was teaching at Downtown LA, 

although I really wanted for years.

Fernando Artiga ( Be-longing ) started to resonate in the back of my head 

after I got to see him in person leading a beautiful
conscious dance class at a Festival,

surrounded by some of the best performers and dancers in the LA scene.

I instantly got attracted to his energy and his methodology leading the group, 

as Iwana Masaki describes Butoh:

“ every performance itself has an ultimate expression “ 

and for Fernando, every dance has not a codified classical technique 

rigidly adhered to within an authoritative controlled lineage,

form comes of itself,

only insofar as there is a spiritual content, to begin with.

I met Fernando in person couple of months ago,

after several months of trying to connect back and forth,

he invited me to one of his classes held in Culver City.

It was a fun introduction to his world and a beautiful invitation. 

From that day until today we have been engaging in long deep conversations 

to try to define with words what is behind the movement,
how do we create a certain energy in a space,

how the vibrations of our own inner being
connects to the profound of the common free will
and resonates with the universe. 

Movement in dance, dancing as a pillar for the community to express pain,

love, courage, abandonment, sex, joy, captivity, freedom, dreams, who we are and

who we don’t even know we are.

Movement as a tool to heal from the inside out, 

how self-healing is the key to empower our community.

We need the community to mirror ourselves,
we need our dance partners on the dance floor to 

learn and reflect from them,
to see the lines of movement created by their bodies
in connection with the rhythm,

to be elevated and moved across the spectrum of possibilities
 presented in the outer world,

for many of us, the dance floor is a  meditation on movement,
great epiphanies are revealed while dancing,

the slowest you move the best you can see your roots in any feeling,

there are no does and don’ts, right or wrong on the dance floor,

we dance by the influence of the unknown with the highest knowledge,  

the more you let go of the patriarch the more you clean the layers of oppression

and happiness occurs as result of freedom.

The Law of Allowing – the state of allowing is the purest state of manifesting. 

Allowing things to move without resistance and to evolve and grow naturally.

Allowing yourself to express on its unique way, without judgments, guilt, jealousy, fear;

The Law of Allowing is about accepting and allowing this uniqueness 

(as long as they are not hurting others), 

instead of resisting others’ distinct paths and expression even if you don’t agree with them.

Another source and reference to what movement and
expression mean to me are the classic french mimetic techniques. 

where for the alterations of the nervous system, through fasting, pain, 

extreme situations among others,

qualities of movements are produced that are then used
to construct the form and expression of the dance. 

I discovered the deep transformative effects of dancing
while I was living in Amsterdam in 1998/99
and took part of one of the most incredible social experiments
I have seen or hear about: The Elf Squat Experiment,
an unreal world created out of dreams, mythology, art, colors, and music,
a lot of music, all kind of music 24/7 in every single breath, mainly psychedelic trance,
a 5 floors building where every corner had its own entity and personality;
a vortex community of artists and people from all over the world
dealing with their light and darkness at 150 bpm ( beats per minute)
.... but  I will write about this
in the future another post or maybe more than one: )

WHEN IN DOUBT...DANCE IT OUT.