DANCING IN THE DARK

What is Dancing in the Dark?

Dancing in the dark is a 90-minute moving meditation in darkness.​ 

We begin together in low light, with a small cup of cacao, before the lights go out and the music begins. The music is not simply a playlist. Each journey is carefully composed as an arc, informed by my training and experience of working with music in psychedelic and altered states, beginning gently, gathering and ascending, moving through intensity and expansion, before gradually descending towards stillness and return.

​

Deep house, Arabic rhythms, psychedelic and spiritual music, unexpected sounds and songs we had forgotten we loved. As the music changes, so does the body. There is something about repetition, rhythm and vibration that allows us to stop following every thought and begin listening differently, to the shape of the music, to sensation, and to whatever is happening inside us.

There is no choreography and nothing to get right. Move wildly. Barely move. Sit down. Lie on the floor for a bit. Find the music again. Nobody is watching

Each journey is different

Over time, each gathering will explore a different theme. Sometimes this may begin with a medicine or sacred plant and the traditions, stories and symbolism that have gathered around it, its light and its shadow, its place in healing, ritual or altered states of consciousness. At other times we might begin with a place, an element, a scent, a particular quality of sound or an energetic tradition. These threads may appear through the music, botanical essences and aroma, cacao, story and the sensory atmosphere of the room, sometimes drawing inspiration from different landscapes and cultures around our beautiful planet. They are not something you need to understand or believe in. They simply become another layer of the journey.

​

And then we turn out the lights and dance.

.

Why I created it

​

Much of my work has been concerned with the places we go when ordinary thinking is no longer quite enough. Through my work with altered states and psychedelic experience, I’ve become fascinated by the extraordinary capacity of music to take us somewhere — to deepen an experience, hold us there and, eventually, bring us back.

​

I have also always struggled to meditate. My mind is something of a racehorse, and asking it simply to be still has rarely been the way to quieten it. It needs a racetrack, something it can move with, something that can gather and harness all the noise. For me, that has often been music and movement. Somewhere inside rhythm and repetition, thought becomes less interesting. Attention drops into the body and a different kind of quiet arrives. I find stillness in movement.

​

There is a point, somewhere inside rhythm and repetition, when I stop trying to quieten my mind. Thought simply becomes less interesting because something else has become more compelling. Attention drops into the body. The music holds me, and a different kind of quiet arrives.

Perhaps meditation doesn’t always have to mean sitting still.

Beautiful Ibiza

​

Another part of this began somewhere rather less obvious. I went to Ibiza expecting pleasure, music, perhaps a little hedonism. I didn’t expect to find something that felt sacred. Dancing in the dark, I stopped watching myself. I was simply inside my body. And somewhere in that experience, I remembered something I had forgotten.

As a child, when I came home overwhelmed from school, I would retreat to my bedroom, put on music and dance, sometimes for hours. I hadn’t thought about it for years. I think our bodies sometimes know things long before our minds understand them or before memory permits us to recall them. Mine, it seemed, had remembered the way there. And when I looked back, I realised that music and movement had followed me quietly throughout my life. I dance in the kitchen while making supper. Every research paper or manuscript I have written has, folded somewhere within its pages, a soundtrack. And every bout of writer’s block (there have been many) has eventually lifted because I have got out of my seat and to find the words I am trying to express. Perhaps that is what Ibiza gave back to me: something my body had known all along.

Sometimes we don’t think our way into presence. Sometimes the body gets there first.

Dancing in the Dark grew from wondering what might happen if we deliberately created a space for that.

​

Come as you are

​

You don’t need to be a dancer. Come in your oldest leggings. Put your hair up. Come in your pyjamas if you like. We’re not terribly interested in what a body looks like here. We’re interested in what happens when you get back inside it.

*

We meet on the last Thursday of each month , 7.30–9pm
Carswell Farm, South Devon
£18

​

​

​

The WhatsApp group is where I share practical details, future dates and the little things that will accompany each journey.

Please note: members of a WhatsApp group can see one another’s phone numbers.