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    Dance For Life
    Dance For Life
    Dance For Life
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    Dance For Life

    By Julia Franks

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    About this ebook

    Before humankind could talk, tell stories, or build collective endeavours, it was 'rhythmic movement in time' that gave the first spark to the human instinct to collaborate. Dance supported a massive switch in human orientation which set the stage for our extraordinary evolutionary journey.

     

    Dance made settlement and survival, belonging and language, ultimately possible. In dance, shared movement, energy exchanges, spontaneous patterns, and communal spaces are forged. Thus, fears and concerns are overcome; social bonds, common purpose, and collective identity evolve.

     

    Dance has transformational power. What ignited our ancestors can inspire us today. That is the central proposition of this book.

     

    In the Western World we lost our dance in the second half of the last millennium. We must revive dance in our lives. This book is the invitation.

     

    The author is Julia Franks, a psychotherapist who has danced with a million people. In her 20s she ran raves in London for a decade. In the 1990s she led 'Spirit in the House', exploring the ecstatic rave experience, without the chemical comedown. Now she is a conscious dance leader in London, and at events and festivals everywhere.

     

    What is conscious dance? It is the opposite of 'self-conscious' dance. Dancing with freedom, as if no-one is watching. Leading conscious dance propelled Julia into a serious enquiry: how and why is dancing good for us today? She reviews evidence of dance as health, wellness, medicine, exercise, befriending, bonding, and spiritual expression.  


    This book observes how dance is now being employed to tackle social and health challenges from isolation and depression, to Parkinson's, dementia, addiction, obesity, and stress. Julia invites us to 'get dancing' and gives us options for how to do it. The voices of dancers form a chorus alongside the story, providing rich texture.

     

    This book will awaken your curiosity to the rhythm of your own dancing body, and the magic evoked by dancing together.

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJulia Franks
    Release dateJan 20, 2025
    ISBN9798230222705
    Dance For Life

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      Book preview

      Dance For Life - Julia Franks

      Preface

      The first time I met Julia Franks, she invited me to dance! Not personally, but via a mailshot in May 1988, just as the 'Second Summer of Love’ was revving up in London. Julia wrote to me about a party night she was organising where young Londoners and young visitors to London could dance together, away from the West End Clubs and their predictable sounds, patterns, and prices. The invitation was too good to ignore, and I bought 50 tickets for my international students who craved the chance to mix and match with London locals on the dance floor.

      Over the next 5 years I attended almost every event that Julia and her group ran, from massive raves in old industrial estates, to boat parties on the River Thames, Jam sessions in remote locations, and ‘signature nights’ at well-known London venues. People flocked to the dance floor: a compelling experience of pure joy and collective energy. Julia transitioned into practicing psychotherapy after the rave scene, and the first event she ran was for inspired clubbers who wanted the magic of dance but without the comedown of chemicals. She called it ‘Spirit in the House’. This neatly captures her core idea; that music and dance are inspiring activities that can deepen human experience.

      For the past 10 years Julia has been training in, and leading, conscious dance sessions. I’ve attended many of them. As Julia explains, conscious dance is not the opposite of unconscious dance, but rather of self-conscious dance. It’s dancing without the self-consciousness that constrains us, and makes us shy, rigid, or stuck. This suddenly all makes sense. What she is about is reclaiming everyone’s ability to dance as if no one is watching, even on a crowded dance floor. This call to uninhibited dancing is the key focus of her practice, to unlock human energy from stale patterns, narrow movement, or from constraining thoughts and misgivings. It is the reclaiming of a birthright, as she so clearly explains.

      Dance for Life has a clarity and intuitive logic to it, that is like a dance itself. The 5 chapters each have their own rhythm, beat, and lyric. There is pace, flow, and shape. We learn how she encountered dance and placed it at the centre of her life. Julia recounts the story of how dance enabled human evolution and civilisation, but also how we ‘lost’ dance. She observes how the last 50 years have fostered the rediscovery of dance world-wide. She illustrates and demonstrates how dance is a force for good in our vulnerable world. Finally, we are introduced to what conscious dance is, and its many varieties. Along the way, we meet historians, anthropologists, psychologists, religious teachers and (most important) lots of wonderful ordinary people who dance with Julia every week, as I do.

      Julia is uniquely qualified. As a former club promoter, current therapist, and conscious dance leader, Julia has curated ‘dance experiences with a purpose’ for more than 30 years and has danced with more than 1,000,000 people. Julia has been convening people and curating dance all her life, she wants everyone to get dancing. This book is a celebration of how dance can make us whole.

      Prof Greg Clark CBE, Fellow, Academy of Social Sciences

      Introduction

      This book is an invitation. An invitation to start dancing again. An invitation to reclaim your love of life though the magic of dance. There is something about dancing that is restorative and enabling of the human spirit. It is at once physical, social, and emotional: a tribal form of collective expression. In my mind, there are 4 different kinds of people who might be interested in this book:

      People like me, dancers, exploring a deeper meaning to life: and how dance can enrich us.

      People interested in wellbeing who want to understand the role of the moving body and to unlock its treasures.

      People looking for a practice to do today which involves dancing with others for community and connection.

      People who are just interested. Curiosity may have drawn you here. You are very welcome too!

      A Call To Dance

      You may think you can’t dance. It doesn’t matter. As the Zimbabwean proverb says:

      ‘if you can walk you can dance’, and even if you can’t walk, you can still dance.

      Here’s what to do: choose a piece of your favourite, uplifting music. Take a couple of deep, slow breaths. Set a timer for 5 minutes. Play your music and follow your body as it moves to the music. Any sort of movement, big beats or small is fine. After 5 minutes, check in with yourself: ask ‘how am I feeling?’. Chances are more upbeat than you were 5 minutes before!

      As I shall explain, I’m an adult woman in her 50s, who, every year, dances for hundreds of hours, and leads dance sessions for people of all ages and backgrounds. Dancing is a human birth right (as chapter 1 reveals), something our ancestors practiced and took for granted until our social norms changed, and our rules made it more difficult to dance freely. Now many of us are reclaiming that freedom to dance and are making space for this magic in our lives.

      As we go along, I will share my story. I grew up in North London in the 70s, and 80s when multiple music cultures competed for the attention of young people, from soul, funk, and disco, to reggae, dub and ska, to the emergence of the house scene and the music genres it spawned in garage, drum n bass, trance, acid house & acid jazz, and the parallel growth of hip hop, rap, grime, and jungle. Along the way, these years carried pop, rock, punk, and the continuous returns to jazz, ‘world music’, Latin, and Afro beats.

      In my teens and early 20s I was mesmerised by the richness of these music scenes and the dancing they inspired. With friends, we would dance for long deep hours. I became a promoter of club nights in London. My main work over a 10 year period was running raves, boat parties, improv and live jam sessions, and large scale dance nights for many thousands of people. In chapter 2 I recount how this evolved. The profound collective joy and transformation experienced by numerous people dancing together led me to a serious enquiry: how and why is dancing good for us?

      I transitioned from promoting rave nights to becoming a psychotherapist and facilitator. I started my own workshop, ‘Spirit in the House’, for people who had been raving and wanted to find the meaning and purpose it might serve. We explored the ecstatic experience without taking drugs or drinking alcohol. We investigated the ecstasy of collective joy and sought ways to have it without chemicals. I married and started a family, and then built a psychotherapy practice. About 10 years later I started dancing again regularly. Not at night clubs and raves, but at conscious dance sessions that have grown rapidly in the past 20 years.

      Chapter 3 covers the important context in the recent rediscovery of dance. The emergence of the New Age, or counter cultures, since the 1970 creates an important context in which dance is now being re-understood. The growth of meditation, yoga, other spiritual practices as well as emerging and revolutionary understanding of how our brains work have reached a startling and profound discovery: Our BODIES are intelligent eco-systems that store and hold our appetites, dreams, and aspirations, and also our traumas, sadness, yearnings, and memories. Through embodied practices we can establish a more intelligent and reciprocal relationship between body and mind, building a new alliance that serves our human needs. I’ve studied many forms of body work from Process Work to Open Floor Movement, and I will explain these in chapter 3.

      One central form of this body work is dance. Since the 1970s we have reclaimed dance from the formulaic world of learned steps and styles, though of course they retain great value, and embraced the idea of free dance, with no set steps or patterns, and no right or wrong way to move. This shift from rule-based dancing to expressive dance mirrors many other changes in our society that also create the context in which dance is being re-evaluated. Dance is no longer seen primarily, or solely, as a form of entertainment, performance, celebration, matchmaking, or flirtation. It is now recognised as a health and wellbeing practice that serves both medical science, health needs and enhanced consciousness. Most profoundly, dance is a form of adults at play.

      In this book, I will be talking about conscious dance. You could also call it dancing with awareness. Unlike many other forms of dance, there are no steps to learn. Conscious dance is about free expression, being invited to follow your own body’s own impulses and patterns of movement, within a structured and led process. It is about freedom of movement. In a conscious dance practice you are offered a container, a space for your own unique dance to safely, and joyfully, evolve. I am not alone in having found this to be life-altering.

      So how is dancing good for us? We’ll look at this in some detail in chapters 3, 4, and 5. But let’s start

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