Temenos Dance Collective
Avant-Garde Conscious Dance
The Temenos Dance Collective is an innovative project dedicated to supporting people explore conscious movement.
In these challenging technology driven times people need safe and well held spaces to connect to their bodies and find relief from their mental distractions.
Temenos sessions are structured to provide participants with an environment to explore and develop their movement practice, make healthy connections and experience the benefits of community.
Nearly all sessions are hosted by Temenos founder, Felix Oram, with some workshops and special events featuring guest facilitators and teachers from across the spectrum of conscious movement.
Our weekly sessions are held every Tuesday and Friday evening in King's Cross and Hackney respectively, with the addition of specialist workshops and dances hosted on various Saturdays through the year.
Please head to the Tickets tab on the website to see what's coming up and to join any of our events.
Our regular sessions include:
Human BE:IN - a weekly Tuesday evening session that invites attendees to find ways to come into the present moment through meditation, sharing and moving together.
Movement Journey - a weekly Friday evening session that supports dancers to engage with their inner landscape and find ways to move and express themselves.
S.O.T.U - a monthly Saturday night community and social event that offers dancers a chance to connect and socialise with others in the community and enjoy a less structured space to dance in.
Deep Space - a restorative stillness-based session that uses meditation, gentle movement and sound healing courtesy of a gong bath from Kaja Nur from Liberating Sounds. These sessions are held throughout the autumn and winter months.
Movement Class Workshops - one off sessions and workshops hosted by professional dancers and teachers with specific areas of expertise.
WHAT DOES THE WORD TEMENOS MEAN?
In ancient Greece a temenos was a sacred enclosure or precinct - a piece of land marked off from common uses and dedicated to a god. It has also been described as a sacred circle where a person can be themselves without fear and where drama can be performed for the purpose of spiritual, emotional and psychological transformation. For ancient Greeks the purpose of the temenos was to have a space that was sacred and that would not be polluted with daily concerns and interferences. The boundary of the temenos served to both contain the energy and protect it.
More recently Carl Jung encouraged us to understand the temenos as an emotional and psychological space as well as a physical one. He described temenos as “a means of protecting the centre of the personality from being drawn out and from being influenced from the outside. It is within such a space that important and unruly unconscious contents can be safely brought into the light of consciousness.
The Temenos Dance Collective seeks to create and foster safe spaces (temenos') to congregate and move in. Environments where time and space can be set aside so that, collectively, we can reinvigorate and replenish and develop a deeper connection to ourselves, our fellow human beings and to the life force that runs through the universe. A temenos cannot be bought, rather it must be cultivated. It must be developed over time through conscious intention and careful work.