Ecstatic Dance & Conscious Dance: Exercises & Activities

This course explores a wide range of different activities, exercises and ideas that conscious dance and ecstatic dance facilitators can try in their ecstatic dance workshops and groups.

The course is based on a broad conception of 'ecstatic dance' that refers not only to dance practices aimed at ecstatic and otherwise heightened states of consciousness but also as an arena in which to explore other aspects of mental health improvement, personal development, and social and emotional growth. To this end we explore a range of fun interpersonal dance activities as well as more typical activities that involve mindfulness, embodiment, and visualisations.

Activities range from the silly to the serious, some focus on interpersonal development whilst others focus on intrapersonal healing, some ideas are fully-developed whilst others are 'half-baked' and put forward in the hope that you will add seasoning; the course aims to explore as wide a range of possibilities and ideas as possible and I hope to add new ideas to the course as students contribute to it.

The activities and exercises in this course are based on my 15+ years of attending ecstatic dance workshops and groups around the world, the countless hours I've spent in personal private ecstatic dance practice, many nights dancing like a lunatic on psytrance dancefloors, a lot of reading on the subject, as well as my own imagination!

The ideas, activities, and exercises explored in this session are offered in the hope that ecstatic dance facilitators will use them in more experimental approaches to ecstatic dance: I hope that you'll try some of them out and see what works for your group and which ideas are of benefit to your ecstatic dance workshop participants.

The course is light-hearted, unpretentious, casual and informal! It's aimed at ecstatic dance facilitators, dance instructors wishing to explore ecstatic dance in their work,  and dance and movement therapists.

Keywords: ecstatic dance, conscious dance, dance rituals, ecstatic dance facilitator training, ecstatic dance workshops, ecstatic dance activities, ecstatic dance group exercises, professional development