Circle Dance

One of the things I love about our Circle Dance Network is the grassroots quality, the liveliness, the “anarchy” which can lead to abuses like someone teaching a distorted version of a dance as “authentic”.  But I don’t see how you prevent that from happening without developing bureaucratic restrictions and rigidity.  Or losing the input from some truly creative person who comes in from another lineage.  I see Sacred/Circle/World Dance as part of the folk tradition and I see the folk tradition as a huge river of many sources, braiding them together, and creating a wide delta with many mouths.  So much richness!  And to me it contains the best of the human spirit, the richness and diversity that bursts out into communal celebration. We worry about trying to preserve something, but I think that’s a mistake.  Preserve as many dances as possible, not as museum pieces, but as living entities that change and evolve as they move into changing conditions.  Specific dances will get lost along the way, and that’s an occasion for mourning, as is the loss of species from our beautiful planet.  But the creative spirit that generates dances as community celebration will go on.  I am firmly convinced that there will be people dancing in circles around campfires in the far future — even if there are only 10,000 people living near the poles on a shrouded and overheated planet.
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