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Paper short abstract:

5 Rhythms and Open Floor are free-form dance practices often presented as moving meditations: they focus on bodily, sensory and emotional dimensions, while participants point out feelings of totality. The paper explores how the practice builds a paradoxical and powerful experience of the Self.

Paper long abstract:

5 Rhythms and Open Floor are amateur movement practices I labelled under the expression Free-form Mindful Dances: often presented as “moving meditation” or “mindful movement”, they are situated at the crossroad of dance therapy, personal transformation processes and contemporary spiritualities. Trying to silence excessive “thoughts”, and limiting participants’ talking to rare and short sharing moments during the dance session, they focus on bodily, sensory, and emotional dimensions, which are considered as the authentic part of the individual that must be listened to in order to transform or heal oneself. But alongside this sort of hierarchy, their discourse promotes a holistic vision of the individual (“body-heart-spirit” as they say), while participants point out feelings of an extra-ordinary totality, connection or “integration of the whole Self”. Beyond the great heterogeneity of effects described by dancers – from simple happiness and wellbeing to moments of grace and feeling of sacredness, healing effects (in the sense of care more than cure), existential “revelations” – a common ground seems to lie in an exceptional “convergence” and “unity” experience. This paper will explore how the practice builds, through danced propositions, discourse, vocal instructions and a particular sensory regime, a paradoxical – and all the more powerful – experience of the Self. The ethnographic account – grounded on the echoes between movements and interactions descriptions, instructions and structure analysis, introspective work, drawings, and qualitative interviews – is the result of a four-year intensive fieldwork, lead for a doctoral thesis in Anthropology in France.