Resonance Dance is a shared journey of music, movement and opening to connection as we meet others in the rhythm. We befriend our bodies as they are – moving, feeling, experiencing, with no need to perform particular steps or techniques, simply deepening into our inner experience as a source of aliveness in each moment.

We begin by finding flow, ease and softness in the body as a safe and trusted ground for moving deeper into self-connection. Uncomfortable thoughts and sensations can more easily arise and pass as steady, rhythmic motion shifts the body toward a parasympathetic state of calm, security and trust in people around us (see Porges, 2022), As we allow the music to move us, our self-constructs gently relax, freeing us to explore new possibilities and expand awareness to the resonant “field” of movement around us. We become curious about others – we see them through a softened lens, continuous with ourselves rather than as alien, social “others”. Moving to the same music, our breath, heart and brain activity have already begun to synchronize and the close presence of others is interpreted by the brain to suggest that we are with allies, close relations, a community. This is a very different experience of others than we commonly have in the “new normal” of digital social encounters, where frontal images of face and upper body tend to activate defensive reflexes in the brain and body. In Resonance Dance we have time to gently relax boundaries, to begin to find pleasure in eye contact, to explore physical touch in an atmosphere of trust, and regulate the intensity of these experiences by moving in and out of interactions at a gradual pace. This way of experiencing others can continue well beyond the session, as one participant reported: “Now I look at people and feel like they are with me, not against me”.

Resonance Dance was partly inspired by Biodanza and structured to meet the needs of Anglo-saxon/Northern European populations in which cultural preference for interpersonal space and boundaries was found to inhibit participation. The far greater popularity in these populations of forms such as “Ecstatic Dance” and Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms points to a preference for dancing individually and maintaining personal space, with opportunities for brief interactions followed by re-establishment of boundaries. With this in mind Resonance Dance was developed, to support a more graduated transition for participants into deeper states of trust and relaxation of boundaries, whereby the individual and collective nervous systems might be healed with repeated practice.