It’s 8.30pm on a freezing Thursday evening. I’m inside The Lodge Space, a wellness centre in Canada Water. I’m throwing (dubious) shapes to thumping house music. As instructed, my eyes are closed, but I do allow myself a few sneaky peeks. Opposite me, fellow class members Emma and Kemi are both enjoying the movement of their own youthful limbs: fiery, sexy, absurdly uninhibited. They’re also whooping to the thudding beats of their own wild abandonment. I stay silent.
This is not me as a hedonistic, raving twenty-something, but instead a sober, slightly self-conscious forty-something in athleisurewear, taking one for the team to report on the rise in Ecstatic Dance — a form of movement based on ancient traditions. Shamans used it as a way of connecting to spirits; the ancient Greeks used it as a way to worship the divine; and the Sufis incorporated it into their routines. It’s an abandonment of all inhibitions where one is encouraged to move as your body dictates, often to drums and rhythmic beats. The aim is to achieve a meditative state and fans of this intentional raving say the benefits are significant. Seth Newman, of Ecstatic Dance London, tells me it boosts confidence, enhances creativity and decreases stress, which translates into real world benefits; whether that’s having the courage to ask for a pay rise on Monday morning, or getting a better night’s sleep.
Ecstatic Dance is now sweeping the globe with packed classes everywhere from Bali to Berlin. Sah D’Simone, for example, who incorporates Ecstatic Dance into his Somatic Activated Healing Method™, has nearly half a million Instagram followers and counts spiritual guru Deepak Chopra and Kanye West as fans.
The class I’m at is run by Emma Marshall, founder of Movement Is Medicine, which has 24,000 Instagram followers. Marshall’s method is “a very specific curation of science, indigenous wisdom and rave culture”, she says, that evolved as a way of healing her own traumas after she had life-threatening yet unexplained health issues. Seeking answers in alternative medicine, she ended up in Mexico, venturing into the jungle working with shamans and healers. It had a profound effect on her and now she wants to “get people out their heads and into their bodies”.
Marshall says she’s now taught thousands of people and its benefits are spreading by word of mouth. Practitioners are emerging everywhere. Former EastEnders star Luisa Bradshaw-White left acting after she found her calling doing breathwork and ecstatic dance classes, including FreedOm in the Forest. “There’s no judgement, no thought. It’s just an embodied experience, which utterly changed my life and helped me to just be completely OK about my body and who I am,” she says.
Ecstatic Dance initially gained global and commercial prominence in the late Seventies, with Gabrielle Roth’s 5Rhythms. Roth, who died in 2012, was a dancer who founded The Moving Center in New York and created 5Rhythms to “put the body in motion in order to still the mind”. The practice uses shamanistic, eastern and ecstatic philosophy and is a method that focuses on five body rhythms: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness, and is a way to become conscious through dance. The movement is still going strong today, with the 5Rhythms website stating that it has a tribe of “one hundred thousand-plus feet dancing every year”.
Each Ecstatic Dance facilitator changes the more traditional practice according to their own method — sometimes plucking indigenous traditions and mixing them with their own approaches. Marshall, for example, integrates EFT (tapping along specific meridian points on the body) before the dancing starts.
There are also cacao ceremonies, sound baths and cold water plunges to name a few. But for everyone I speak to, it’s a type of movement meditation. People attend on the premise that they are sober and show respect for their fellow people.
Richard Batts and Renee Lacroix run Ecstatic Dance UK. They tell me the movement boomed after the pandemic. “It’s a meditation, a practice, a party, a workout and therapy. All of the above,” says Lacroix. Why the sudden rise in interest? “With our devices and all our phones, we’re getting automated…digitalised. And with the rise of artificial intelligence, I think there is this instinctive calling to something that is humanising. Something that brings us back down to earth and into our bodies,” says Newman from Ecstatic Dance London.
Marshall agrees. “People are becoming more aware of their own health and I find this much more with Gen Z than anyone else. In my opinion, mental health and physical health are the same thing. There’s no separating them. We are primal beings. We are animals that need to move stuff out of the body — it’s what animals do to release. They shake. They let it go. And when you go into indigenous cultures, and dance and music and drumming, it’s standard.”
Gen Z love it but what about the rest of us? “We have people up to 80 years old too,” Batts says. They also allow kids to attend for free and both Ecstatic Dance UK and Ecstatic Dance London tell me they have wheelchair-users at the dances.
So, after the music winds down, I’m back on the Tube and in bed by 10.30pm. Did I come away feeling, well, ecstatic? I think back to Emma and Kemi, how gloriously free in their expression and movement they were. I loved the way it connected me to my body. The mix of modalities, the old and the new, left me feeling both relaxed and energised and it brought me right back into my youth. But I definitely have social inhibitions to shed. If I attended a few more classes, I think I’d get fully into it. I did sleep like a log, though — and since I’ve left my rave days behind me that’s all I can really ask for.
Where to do ecstatic dance
Ecstatic Dance London, £15-25; ecstaticdancelondon.com
Ecstatic Dance UK, £15 advance and £18 on the door, ecstatic-dance.uk
Movement Is Medicine, £10, movementismedicine.uk
FreedOm In The Forest, £24, linktr.ee/LuisaBradshawWhite
