With Iris Lican and Baltazar Molina

2020: 31 July to August 2  and  28 to 30 August

Where? Sintra mountains, nature and Senhora d’Azenha (Calçada da Penalva nº20 São Pedro de Sintra)

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2021:7 to 12 September

Where? Ireland 

We are Nature, Nature is Us.

We have a body which is interconnected with all Life and all of life’s processes (birth, life, death, transformation, regeneration).

Ancient cultures danced as a spiritual practice. Dance and song are living, active prayers – dynamic meditations that honour the core of silent freedom and take you beyond roles, into the essence of Being.

In this training we will explore the body as animal, as a part of nature, raw, pure, wild. 

We will merge into the organic world and recover how it mirrors and maps our physiology and therefore our psychology.

We will work with the senses, ages, seasons, cycles, space and body structures and their intricate relations with the natural world and it’s elements.

Exploring how ecology and humanity are necessarily connected in our body language and felt sense.

Our approach to the practise of trance dances and ritual drumming is both traditional as well as therapeutic and shamanic. We understand trance dance as being a very effective ancestral response to address somatic trauma. Through dance we merge in a non-verbal space of memory, that enables us to repair the unseen yet present forces within the body and the psyche. Through this practise we stimulate self-regulation of the nervous system, strengthen the body-mind well being and create resilience, health and spiritual awareness.

This is a week long intensive training, the first part of a three week program. It can be done in sequence with the following two weeks or taken independently.

We will work in depth with eco-somatic movement and ritual trance dances, both in wild Nature as well as within the circle space.

This is a work open to men and women, with or without previous dance and movement experience. It can be lived as a self knowledge experience or it may complement the professional skills of bodyworkers, therapists, dancers and yoga practitioners.

> INFO / RESERVATIONS

• From ancestral heritage to present creation
• The function of trance art and ritual in an individual, collective and social level
• The difference between trance and ecstatic practises
• The embodied trance practise
• Stages and cycles of trance
• Bidy, Soul and Spirit
• Trance and trauma: deep understanding of the central and peripheral nervous system
• Creating safe spaces, boundaries and release
• What psychological, emotional and energetic processes may emerge from the trance practise?
• Essential somatic resources: container and content, understanding the dynamic of theses two forces
• Recognising dissociation
• Catharsis: how to identify, allow, contain and integrate
• Integration of the experience: respecting the somatic and psychological balance
• Movement spaciousness and consciousness expansion
• Breath as Life
• Time, space and perception
• The felt time (Kayros) and the chronological time (Chronos) in ritual experience
• Linear time and cyclical time
• Transitions as essential liminal spaces
• Presence and absence
• Experiential anatomy and sense-perception
• Movement and trance as intrinsic languages
• Traditional trance dances from the Magreb, Sahara, Gnawa tradition, Touregs,Egipt, Sufi and Yorubá
• Shamanic trance from South America: Drum ceremonies and spirit journeys