Ecstatic Dance Journey

Description:

In this freeform dance exploration you're invited to come experience deeper connection with yourself and with your community through the power of music, movement, and play.

For those not yet familiar with ecstatic dance it is a gathering dedicated to consciously connecting to ourselves, each other, and our environment, through music and movement. Ecstatic Dance typically has agreements designed to create a safe, respectful, and uninhibited environment for free-form movement, these agreements are…

Radical Responsibility for your own experience.

Giving yourself what you need and asking for help, if you need it.

No verbal expression on the dance floor.

Vocal expressions like singing, laughing, and making monkey sounds are great, but having conversations on the dance floor is not, because thinking about words distracts from getting into our embodied movement self, a self that words and thoughts seem to hinder.

No shoes.

Take'm off. Feels good.

No alcohol or other hard substances

Dancing as consciously as we can

No cell phones.

Don't need'em for dancing

Respect the space, respect yourself, and respect the boundaries of others.

Get clear consent before contact dancing with others and respect when others have communicated their desire to end dance contact.

The Ecstatic Dance Journey will feature a two hour dance mix curated by the facilitator, Professor Gray Balls.

The Professor will begin the dance with playful connection and movement suggestions in order to offer opportunity for dancers to get appropriately acclimated to the space, each other, and these individual bodies we're all inside of.

To solidify our community dance connection further the dance will begin with an opening circle and end with a closing circle. This allows us the opportunity to see and hear from the individuals gathered, to learn fun things about each other, and to get creative in fun ways that don't require much thinking.

All this in the name of achieving a safe place for community supported individual expression which hopefully in turn allows for the individual to feel all the more connected to community. 

Bio:

Born into this world as John Elliott Gray, Professor Gray Balls has been called to this existence to serve as a comedy, dance, silly song-making wizard, conjuring heart-led explorations of movement and connection. His facilitation weaves metaphor, improvisation, and guided play to awaken our inner child and spirit animal selves, creating a safe and vibrant container for authentic expression and community connection.

With roots in the improvisational arts of comedy, voice, and dance, The Professor draws from the concept of “group mind,” a magical, spontaneous state where individuals can move, sing, and play together in harmony without words, plans, or hierarchy. It’s in this flow that we find ourselves co-creating something miraculous; community supported expression of individuality, deepening our sense of connection with ourselves and interconnection with our community, with out much need to talk or think about it.

The Professor became turned on to the power of Ecstatic Dance after living on the place that gets credit for birthing the form in existence, the Big Island of Hawaii, and became inspired to share it with others after witnessing the microcosm of peaceful paradise that dance can bring to a community, and imagining the possibilities of this extending to the macrocosm. As it shall. One dance at a time.

“We're gonna have fun” - Professor Gray Balls