Ecstatic dance

The tradition & historical record

Ecstatic dance is a form of dance in which the dancers, sometimes without the need to follow specific steps, release themselves to the rhythm and move freely as the music takes them, leading to trance and what is said to be a feeling of ecstasy. The effects of ecstatic dance begin with that ecstasy, which is described as being experienced in differing degrees. Dancers are described as feeling connected to others, and to their own emotions. The dance has been described as a form of meditation, sometimes used to help manage stress and to move towards a state of serenity. In the ancient and widespread practice of shamanism, ecstatic dance and rhythmic drumming are used with the intention of altering consciousness in spiritual practices. Ecstatic sacred dances are known also from religious traditions around the world. Modern ecstatic dance was revived by Gabrielle Roth in the 1970s and formalised in her 5Rhythms practice; it is now found in variants across the western world. Attitudes to ecstatic dance have varied widely. In the 1920s, musicologists such as Paul Nettl and Fritz Böhme considered it primitive and unrefined. More recently, it has been compared to dancing in raves and in club culture, the anthropologist Michael J. Winkelman and the musicologist Rupert Till finding in these forms elements of ritual, spirituality, and healing. The philosopher Gediminas Karoblis relates early ecstatic dance to religious ritual, stating that all well-executed dance borders on ecstasy. ¹

Ecstasy (from Ancient Greek ἔκστασις ékstasis, in turn from ἐκ (ek, out) and ἵστημι (hístēmi, I stand) is a subjective experience of total involvement of the subject, with an object of his or her awareness. In classical Greek literature it meant the removal of the mind or body "from its normal place of function." The primary effect of ecstatic dance, as for instance in sacred dance, is intended to be ecstasy. The religious historian Mircea Eliade stated that shamans use dance, repetitive music, fasting, and hallucinogenic drugs to induce ecstasy. The ethnologist Maria-Gabriela Wosien identified four degrees of ecstasy that dancers may experience: "the warning, the whisper of inspiration, the prophecy, and finally the gift, the highest grade of inspiration." The described effects of ecstatic dance include a feeling of connection with others, and with the dancer's own emotions; serving as a meditation, providing a way of coping with stress and restoring serenity; and serving as a spiritual practice. A psychological study has described it as "generating experiences of flow states, play, creativity, belonging and community". Lisa Fasullo of the Center for Transformative Movement in Boulder, Colorado and colleagues present ecstatic states as "accessible and like traditional meditative states – specifically yoga – as observable, identifiable, discernible, able to be sensed and experienced", and ecstatic dance as "an effective method of attaining these elevated and energized experiences, and... ¹

Little is known directly of ecstatic dance in ancient times. However, Greek mythology tells several stories of the Maenads; the maenads were intoxicated female worshippers of the Greek god of wine, Dionysus, known for their "ecstatic revelations and frenzied dancing". The mythical female followers of Dionysus, including bacchants and thyiads as well as maenads, were said to have sought the "wild delirium" of possession by the god so they could "get out of themselves", which was called "ekstasis". The male counterparts of the Maenads were the Korybantes (Ancient Greek: Κορύβαντες), armed and crested ecstatic dancers who worshipped the Phrygian goddess Cybele with drumming and dancing. They were the offspring of the muse Thalia and the god Apollo. The Greeks often confused them with other ecstatic male confraternities, such as the Idaean Dactyls (Ancient Greek: Δάκτυλοι Ἰδαῖοι) or the Cretan Kouretes (Κουρῆτες), spirit-youths (kouroi) with magical powers who acted as guardians of the infant Zeus. The myths gave rise to ancient Greek practices in honour of Dionysus. The oreibasia ("mountain dancing") was a midwinter Dionysian rite practised by women, and said to be originally an "unrestrained, ecstatic dance where the 'human' personality was temporarily replaced by another", though it eventually became structured into a definite ritual. The theologian W. O. E. Oesterley argued that Old Testament passages such as 1 Kings 18:26, "They [The prophets of Baal] limped about the altar they had made", and 1 Kings 18:21, "How long will ye limp upon two legs?" describe a kind of ecstatic dance used for pagan worship in which the knees were bent, one after the other, to give a kind of limping step repeated for each leg. ¹

A variety of religions and other traditions, founded at different times but still practised around the world today, make use of ecstatic dance. ¹

Early in the 20th century, the Austrian dancer Grete Wiesenthal turned the formal Viennese Waltz into an ecstatically danced performance with "swirling, euphoric movement and suspended arches of the body", the dancers "with unbound hair and swinging dresses". Modern ecstatic dance is a style of dance improvisation with little or no formal structure or steps to follow or any particular way to dance. Modern ecstatic dance has developed alongside Western interest in tantra; the two are sometimes combined, and ecstatic dance often plays a part in tantra workshops. The dancer and musician Gabrielle Roth brought the term "Ecstatic Dance" back into current usage in the 1970s at the Esalen Institute with her dance format called 5Rhythms. This consists of five sections, each accompanied by music with a different rhythm, together constituting a "Wave". The five rhythms (in order) are Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness. The form strongly expects dancers to shape a distinct movement style consistent with each of the five rhythms, which in practice is unlike other contemporary ecstatic dance as these rhythms often look similar between dancers, but has few other rules. The dance music set is carefully arranged, as documented in Roth's 1989 book Maps to Ecstasy and a set of three DVDs. ¹

My eyes scan the dancing bodies but keep returning to a young man. He's been gliding along the surface doing his standard repertoire of flowing moves, when suddenly something shifts inside of him. He transcends his boredom and enters the body of a panther on Rollerblades. Moves spin out from his center in endless waves, some breathtaking to watch. He disappears in the dance until all that's left of him is a mop of bleached-white hair... ¹

The musicologist Paul Nettl, writing in 1929, granted that ecstatic dance had emotional power "expressive of some psychic exaltation, some intensified emotion", and that the "ordered rhythm" on which it was based was hypnotic, inducing a meditative state and the "dissolution of consciousness", but argued that it was a "primitive" form of dance, a precursor to "hi… ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Ecstatic dance”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

Ecstatic dance is dance leading to a trance and a feeling of ecstasy, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 1 external register, which can be verified through the citation. ²