Not Wordless Today

Dance is the fastest, most direct route to the truth.
~ Gabrielle Roth

Noted musician, author, recording artist, philosopher, shaman of transformation, and beloved dancer, Gabrielle Roth, has died.

Founder of Raven Recordings and The Moving Center School, creator of the 5Rhythms™ movement system, and with 20 albums of percussive-centered dance music to her credit, she was also on the faculty of the Kripalu and Esalen Institutes, as well as a regular teacher at The Omega Institute.

Here is Omega’s description of her and her work:

Gabrielle Roth has devoted her life to honoring and communicating the language of primal movement and experimental theater. Since the mid-1960s, Roth has taken thousands of people on a journey from physical and emotional inertia to the freedom of ecstasy, from the tyranny of the chattering ego-mind to the blessed emptiness of stillness.

Gabrielle Roth’s workshops and retreats have an electric intensity that mates contemporary currents of rock music, modern theater, and poetry to the ancient pulse of shamanism. Author of Maps to Ecstasy, Connections, and Sweat Your Prayers, Gabrielle Roth is artistic director of her dance/theater/music company, The Mirrors, and has been a member of the Actor’s Studio. Her award-winning musical and video recordings are on the cutting-edge of shamanic trance and dance music.

Roth is creator of The 5Rhythms™, a poetic and practical practice that directly addresses the divorce of body from heart, and heart from mind, that has plagued our culture. She teaches The 5Rhythms from the heart of the community—The Moving Center® NYC. The Moving Center is the vision and vehicle of Roth’s body of work. She is currently teaching experimental theater in New York based on The 5Rhythms and training others to use shamanic methods within artistic, education, and healing contexts.

She is often joined in her classes and workshops by her son, Jonathan Horan, who teaches with her at Omega Institute, The Moving Center NYC, and other venues worldwide.

=============

In Gabrielle’s honor, I encore this poem that I’ve shared here before, written by 5Rhythms practitioner and poet, Jewel Mathieson.

We Have Come to Be Danced

by Jewel Mathieson 

We have come to be danced
Not the pretty dance
Not the pretty pretty, pick me, pick me dance
But the claw our way back into the belly
Of the sacred, sensual animal dance
The unhinged, unplugged, cat is out of its box dance
The holding the precious moment in the palms
Of our hands and feet dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the jiffy booby, shake your booty for him dance
But the wring the sadness from our skin dance
The blow the chip off our shoulder dance.
The slap the apology from our posture dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the monkey see, monkey do dance
One two dance like you
One two three, dance like me dance
but the grave robber, tomb stalker
Tearing scabs and scars open dance
The rub the rhythm raw against our soul dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the nice, invisible, self-conscious shuffle
But the matted hair flying, voodoo mama
Shaman shakin’ ancient bones dance
The strip us from our casings, return our wings
Sharpen our claws and tongues dance
The shed dead cells and slip into
The luminous skin of love dance.

We have come to be danced
Not the hold our breath and wallow in the shallow end of the floor dance
But the meeting of the trinity, the body breath and beat dance
The shout hallelujah from the top of our thighs dance
The mother may I?
Yes you may take 10 giant leaps dance
The olly olly oxen free free free dance
The everyone can come to our heaven dance.

We have come to be danced
Where the kingdom’s collide
In the cathedral of flesh
To burn back into the light
To unravel, to play, to fly, to pray
To root in skin sanctuary
We have come to be danced

We have come.