Temenos Dance Collective
Celebrating conscious dance in all its forms
HOW IT WORKS
The Temenos Dance Collective is a first of its kind multi-disciplinary conscious dance project set up to provide dancers with a space to explore a range of conscious movement modalities and to enhance and expand their personal movement practice.
Rather than focusing on one specific modality the Collective celebrates and gives space to all forms of conscious movement, be it 5Rhythms, Contact Improvisation, or Ecstatic Dance (to name just three).
Our purpose is to provide a safe and holistic community space to dancers of all levels and support them as they explore the intersection between the physical, emotional, psychological and social domains.
Our regular sessions include:
Movement Playground - a dance that encourages us to explore movement though play.
Deep Space - a soft exploration of movement with healing and restoration at its core.
Contact Improvisation - improvised dancing that involves the exploration of one's body in relationship to others by using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch, and movement.
We also work with a range of teachers and professionals to offer bespoke sessions that introduce contemporary dance to non-professional dancers.
Check the Tickets tab for details of all our upcoming events.
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.
