Gabrielle Roth: A Hoop Dance Tribute

 Time after time we read incredible stories, hear personal anecdotes, and have possibly even experienced our own healing and transformation inside the magic circle that is our hoop. Let's be honest though, dear hoopers. We haven't entirely discovered something new. When it comes to the healing power of movement and dance we've actually discovered something very, very old. Last week the world lost Gabrielle Roth, one of the great leaders in meditative dance and healing through movement. Following a battle with lung cancer, the world lost the founder of the 5Rhythms dance movement, an amazing spirit, an incredible pioneer that not only touched my life personally, but whose beliefs, ideas and practices have parallelled the recoveries and discoveries in our hooping lives long before the modern hooping movement began. Who was Gabrielle Roth? What are the 5Rhythms and how can they play a role in our hoop dance healing? What were some of the contributions she made to the world that I will continue to think about for years to come? Let me tell you what I know.

In the 1960's, Roth created a way of finding consciousness through dance. According to her, "Physical movement is key to unlocking the spirit." Perhaps this is one of the reasons many hoopers find such a deep connection to Roth and her philosophies. As hoopers we often talk about "hoop bliss", freedom through our movement, getting lost inside of our hoops, and other occurrences within our dance that are often seen as spiritual, meditative and/or healing. Roth found these experiences years before our still relatively new wave of hoop dance had manifested. And more than that, Roth invited us to look even further back, that we needed to defer to our feet and move back to our roots. In the mind of Roth, these roots are made of light that connect us to 75,000 years of ecstatic dance tradition, to all who have danced to transport themselves out of their heads and into the wilderness of their own psyches, to experience in poetic patterns the shape and wonder of their souls. Though she was the founder of Ecstatic Dance and of the 5Rhythms dance movement, Roth generally spoke of dance less specifically when speaking of the power it holds.
 5Rhythms is a movement meditation practice Roth devised that she drew from indigenous and world traditions using tenets of shamanistic, ecstatic, mystical and eastern philosophy. The practice also draws from Gestalt therapy, the human potential movement and transpersonal psychology as well. Fundamental to the practice is the idea that everything is energy, and that energy moves in waves, patterns and rhythms. Roth described it as a soul journey, saying that by moving the body, releasing the heart, and freeing the mind, one can connect to the essence of the soul, the source of inspiration in which an individual has unlimited possibility and potential.

5Rhythms allows the participant to become deeply engaged in their own path, to find their own way in movement. And while teachers of 5Rhythms participate in a long training process, well over 300 hours, in order to teach others to find their own flow through the Rhythms - Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical and Stillness - one can not help but think of hooping teachers and community members who consistently reiterate the idea that each dancer has their own flow and expression within the hoop. So many of Roth's ideas translate fluently into the world of hoop dance. Hoopers lucky enough to have experience in 5Rhythms or ecstatic dance will also tell you that it opened up their hooping, often in the most glorious ways.

Gabrielle Roth once said, "Dance is the fastest, most direct route to the truth -- not some big truth that belongs to everybody, but the get down and personal kind, the what's-happening-in-me-right-now kind of truth. We dance to reclaim our brilliant ability to disappear in something bigger, something safe, a space without a critic or a judge or an analyst." Wow, did you hear that? I mean really, say it out loud to yourself several times. Her words and philosophy on the power of dance have influenced me deeply. Understanding that my own experience in the hoop is validated by an elder with profound knowledge and understanding of movement, healing and meditation has helped create a safe space for me to explore my own truth within my spin.

The loss of Gabrielle Roth is profound. Roth worked at the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health and at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. She also founded an experimental theatre company in New York, wrote three books, created over twenty albums of trance dance music with her band The Mirrors (on iTunes), and directed or has been the subject of ten videos.  I know we all are incredibly grateful for all that she brought to the world, to dance, to movement meditation, to healing through movement and ultimately to helping us better understand the healing power of the hoop in our own lives. Rest in Peace Gabrielle and thank you for having been here.
           
 Composer and musician Nicholas Caputo plays piano while Erin Sparrow hoops in this beautiful tribute to Gabrielle Roth.