I have learned many skills to tone my body, relax my mind, and purify my energy. Many of these skills have been passed down to me in communities and environments where people experience an easy life relative to the world of human experience today. Many of the people who have taught me meditation, yoga, and dance often have a stable home, regular income, access to drinking water, are relatively healthy, well educated by western standards, and are predominantly middle class and white. I respect the skills I have learned tremendously and trust their power can transform more than our individual lives. I have also noticed that many of these communities are aware of their privilege to a limited extent.
Love Making Dances creates a spiritually nourishing environment for heart based truth telling of the collective. We recognize that ignorance is a form of blocked energy and that with patient examination the collective has as much potential to heal as we do in our own lives. Multigenerational grief, rage, and trauma have become embedded in our current political environment. Protesting and lobbying for issues does not always address the rupturing and healing of these deep emotions. Likewise in our personal lives we tend to conform to this superficial silence or divorce our inner growth from our collective growth. Our devotion to recognize and participate in the past and current social climate is one of the deepest forms of self respect and service to humanity. This work allows a more conscious and self actualizing silence. On March 10, 2008, scientists detected drug contamination in our tap water due to excessive use in our population and the inability to filter these drugs during our sanitation process. This contamination reminds us of our interdependence, a sacred vulnerability we have been asked to explore simply by being human.
Why have we come to this planet in these white American bodies? How can our awareness and transformation be of service to ourselves and to others?
staying close to each other even when we roar
What is conscious activism? Applying our life force to the intentions we have for our community,
without separating ourselves from the transformation.
Love Making Dances is greatly supported by White Folks Soul, by Any Dance Necessary. We facilitate workshop and performance series incorporating healing, creating, movement and re-evaluation of power to unlearn racism and replace it with authentic creative relationships and a celebration of who we are.
WHITE FOLKS SOUL, BY ANY DANCE NECESSARY
An experimental dance company exploring the incompatibility of wholeness and the race construct for white people.
WHITE FOLKS SOUL, BY ANY DANCE NECESSARY currently tours states of consciousness in our Living Room Series. We are making more room in our living experience through performance, facilitated dialogue, and celebrating with good food in someone's living room. We are most interested in creating a deep honest inquiry in our experience as white people involuntarily redeeming institutional privileges on a daily basis. We want to inspire the language, accountability, power analysis, trusting relationships, and deep comunication necessary to unlearn racism as it interrupts a sense of who we are and our relationship to the divine through culture. OUR BLOG
Movement
Undoing racism is a life practice, just like yoga. Forcing your ankle behind your head, or forcing accountability does not deepen the practice. I have found deep change often looks subtle.
Some of the undoing racism communities I have entered focus on the mind and the heart. We might sit in a chair for hours trying to move mindsets without moving our spines. I believe the mind/body relationship in our society is akin to the master/slave relationship. We demand our bodies serve us all the time, and often pay attention to them to the extent they fail us. Undoing racism from the mind is a product of our mind-dominant society.
The people we celebrate for their minds tend to be white men, and the people we celebrate for their bodies tend to be women, children, and people of color. We internalize a hierarchy that deep change must focus on our mindset. Whtie Folks Soul, By Any Dance Necessary acknowledges the coherence of the body at seven energy levels based on the chakra system (community, sexuality/emotion, power, heart, expression, intuition/mind, receptivity to divine).
Violence and peace start in our own bodies and our intimate relationships. The universe already supports our work. Giving ourselves time to meditate, to dance, to remember this support, to nourish our vision of the world we want to live in, empowers us as sacred activists. If we know ourselves as spirit, we are more than our well formed opinions and we can detach from them to listen to every voice. This is a new approach of undoing racism and replacing it with a celebration of who we are.
Who we are: Alyssa, Alexis, Jesse, Zahava
If you are interested in learning more about our work or scheduling a living room tour with us please email Zahava. Thank you Eddie Moore Jr. and the 10th anual national White Privilege Conference for hosting our workshop:
Re-Educating the BodyMind to Honor the Soul Free from Racism.