The 5Rhythms® (also known as the Wave®) are a movement map designed by American dance artist and theater director Gabrielle Roth. There are 5 different patterns – Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness – that can be accessed, often using music/imagery and physical instruction to take someone on a dancing journey. This journey is accessible to everyone, whatever the age, experience, race, gender, sexual orientation might be. Even being fit, whilst helpful, is not essential as you the dancer are ultimately in charge of your experience. The teacher is more there to guide, inform and catalyse.
The 5Rhythms are a spiritual practice. They offer a map of the creative process that can be danced, felt, written, sung, touched or prayed. They are a reflection of rhythms and energies that live inside us all. As human beings tend to become habitual in most things, we often find ourselves limiting the full range of movement available to us and just move parts of the body or styles of movement that we are comfortable or identified with. This causes us to lose some of our vitality, becoming limited and restricted in our physical, emotional and mental health and artistry. Using both structured and improvised material; the Rhythms shake all this up, inside and out.
As we bring our attention present, moving with a conscious breath, we discover our substance, clarity, capacity to surrender, lightness and emptiness. Dancing the Wave enables the body to become an instrument, receptive to an experience that can be touching, powerful, liberating, joyful and healing. A new sense of self is born!
[If you’re interested, you can read an excerpt from Wikipedia’s 5Rhythms entry]