HOW IT WORKS
The Temenos Dance Collective is a first of its kind community for conscious dancers and those that are committed to movement as a way of life. Rather than focusing on one specific dance modality the Collective celebrates and honours all forms of conscious dance, be it 5Rhythms, Contact Improvisation, or Ecstatic Dance (to name just three). Its mission is to become an essential resource that supports dancers to explore, through embodied movement, the boundaries and spaces that exist between the physical, emotional and psychological.
Through hosting weekly dance sessions with guest DJs and teachers from across the spectrum of conscious dance we help to nurture the creation of a new and authentic community.
We believe that when those who truly understand the language of movement and dance come together the opportunity for something transformational presents itself at both the individual and collective level.
The Collective is suitable for dancers and professionals from all modalities who are seeking to congregate and move with other like-minded individuals and develop their movement practice in a contained way.
Each weekly session is held by an experienced DJ or facilitator with a deep understanding and appreciation of music, conscious movement and somatics.
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.
