Biodanza: for your vitality, confidence and joy of life
What is Biodanza?
Biodanza uses music and movement, as well as your connection with the group, to unleash your vitality, confidence and joy of life.
There are no specific steps to remember, no need to look good, no wrong or right. It’s an experiment in connecting with more of yourself, while building a habit of finding and choosing what's good for you.
Class structure
Each class (or vivencia) is a crafted sequence of 10 to 14 dance / movement exercises. Each in turn are explained and often shown by Geoff. You try them yourself, inspired by the music and demonstration.
Typically, we start all together in a circle, settling in, moving to a clear and enlivening rhythm. When ready, you can begin to connect with others around the circle, receiving your welcome into the group.
More exercises follow that raise your energy levels, aliveness, and create playfulness. We reach a peak of this vitality, which supports a letting go into other types of nourishing and harmonising movement.
There'll be individual dances, in pairs, small groups, and everyone interacting together.
We keep slowing down with increasingly subtle exercises, perhaps some simple and sensitive contact with others, then celebrate our journey together with a dance as a whole group.
My own experience of leading Biodanza
I have a sense of guiding and soothing your nervous systems, like a conductor of an orchestra delicately taking you from one movement to the next. I help you express the different qualities that lie in each piece of the symphony.
From my couples counselling work, I feel a natural affinity with the soothing language that creates a doorway to feeling safe and to your heart opening. I'm familiar with the journey to safe relating and belonging, and the new life that can unlock.
What Biodanza sets out to give you
Biodanza seeks to help you deepen or reawaken your connection with the joy of life.
Each exercise stimulates the arising of movements in an increasingly natural, playful and spontaneous way, especially with regular Biodanza experience.
Classes deepen your connection with your emotions and build trust in your instincts. Movements become a deep expression of your true inner self, liberated from the norms and past traumas that limit us all.
Changes are intended in many areas of your biology and psychology, such as your brain, nervous system, available energy, sense of wellness. These were goals as the exercises of Biodanza were designed and woven together over decades.
Origins, now a worldwide movement
This incredibly beautiful and profound movement system was developed by a Chilean psychologist called Rolando Toro in the 1960s, and has since grown into a worldwide movement of personal development and transformation.
Research - scientifically observing the benefits
Biodanza was founded on the desire (and necessity) for real emotional and physical growth. It was intended that this would support societal change, as we come together in open hearted and playful ways.
As a result, many therapists and sociologists have turned to the approach to deepen their work with groups, and have been keen to measure it's effectiveness. Here are some research links.
