Sacred Dance

Before concluding our examples, it is helpful to turn briefly to a form of creative expression thus far not addressed, namely, sacred dance. Like other forms of creative expression, dance offers the opportunity for participants to be lost in the dance - to loosen their boundaries while being totally immersed in an altered state of consciousness. As explained by Janet Roseman in Dance Was Her Religion: The Sacred Choreography of Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Martha Graham (2004), dance is one of the earliest of all art forms; religiously and spiritually, for centuries humans danced in rituals to please and placate the gods. Historically, the body has conveyed the sacred symbology of the universe and of the gods. In terms of the divisions proposed by Viladesau, dance aptly demonstrates the third division: discernment of the use of a language - pictorial, musical, and gestural symbols - to embody, formulate, interpret, and communicate knowledge of the sacred. As Roseman suggests, dance contains opportunities to re-align one's body with spiritual longings; moreover, dancing provides for the dancer an opportunity to align the life force of the body through movement.

Roseman explains that Isadora Duncan, Ruth St. Denis, and Martha Graham considered themselves prophets of dance, serving as articulate and insightful spokespersons and even creating their own schools of training. Implicit in the creation of their sacred choreographies, for Roseman, was the potential to enter into an ecstatic and mystical state, illustrating a body-centered mysticism. In order

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to better understand the relationship between spirituality and dance, we turn briefly to St. Denis, an American dancer who lived from 1879-1968.

"She was a mystic of the eclectic variety that seems typically American," states Suzanne Shelton (1981, p. xvi) of Ruth St. Denis. During her life St. Denis explored Swedenborgianism, Transcendentalism, Christian Science, Buddhism, Vedanta, and varieties of Christian thought. She became a life-long Christian Scientist - its philosophy served to provide a focus for her interest in mysticism. Later she was attracted to Vivekananda and non-dualist Vedanta. In 1908 St. Denis met with Paramananda, a disciple of Vivekananda who adhered to non-dualist Vedanta as outlined by Sankara. In later years she carried with her two books - the Bible and an anthology of Sankara's writings. From the beginning of her career, St. Denis's dances reflected Hindu practices and Vedic concepts. While professionally, St. Denis submerged herself in divine experience, offstage her personal life was an erratic series of exploitative relationships, destructive passions, and unfulfilled dreams, reflecting a chronic tension between spirituality and sexuality (Shelton, 1981).

St. Denis staged numerous concerts in which she became the goddess. She also created hundreds of programs honoring the Virgin Mary and Jesus - solo works including The Blue Madonna, Masque of Mary, and The Gold Madonna. Her dance inspired the field of modern liturgical dance. Her dances drew upon Japanese, Indian, Siamese, Egyptian, Javanese, andChinese cultures, yet each of them focused on the merger of the individual with the divine (Shelton, 1981). She appeared on stage as various deities from diverse cultures, including: the Virgin Mary, Radha (Indian), Kuan Yin (Chinese), Kwannon (Japanese), Pelee (volcano goddess), Isis (Egyptian), and Ishtar (Babylonian). St. Denis states: '"All of my best works are as goddesses - the cosmic order of life'" (cited in Roseman, 2004, p. 92).

Of the Virgin Mary, St. Denis wrote: "Mary was to symbolize the ultimate creating principle which embraces compassion as well as creation. Mary is the conceiving principle which contains no element of error, discord, or the limitations of time and space" (St. Denis, 1939, p. 241). She not only sought to become Mary, as she had become other goddesses on stage, but Roseman suggests that St. Denis sought to integrate the spiritual aspects of Mary as a way of reconciling the split between intellect/spirit and body. Her notion that her body could portray the energies of the Divine Mother in dance was one of St. Denis's numerous contributions to liturgical dance.

During her lifetime St. Denis experienced mystical revelations, which provided a foundation for her life's work in sacred dance. Shelton (1981) states:

The intensified spirituality of Ruth's dances reflected the growth in her spiritual life. By instinct and inheritance, she was a mystic who sought the direct experience of, and union with, God. Concerned with sin, she adopted the mystic's view of evil as an absence of Being or a false perspective on Reality, rather than as a vital force that vies with good. The genealogy of St. Denis' particular brand of mysticism can be traced through American Transcendentalism to the

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Swedenborgian mysticism of her parents' Eagleswood colony, to her explorations of Christian Science and, ultimately, Vedanta, the spiritual and philosophical background of Hinduism, (p. 93)

Her interest in the relationship between dance and spirituality led St. Denis to establish many alternative forms of worship that included dance: The Society of Spiritual Arts in 1934, The Church of Divine Dance, and the Rhythmic Choir of Dancers. St. Denis and her husband Ted Shawn founded a dance school, Denishawn, where Martha Graham and many others studied. Dance students studied the history of cultures, philosophy, and metaphysics in addition to being trained in technique. St. Denis held a firm commitment to the integration of both the spiritual and physical components of dance.

All three dancers (Duncan, St. Denis, and Graham), explains Roseman, experienced ecstatic states when they danced. They permitted their audiences an opportunity to be part of sacred healing space and to enter the magic of ceremony. Dance, from this perspective, is very much an expression of the search for the sacred. It is also a search for the self via the body. As with other forms of creative expression, dance can be viewed as a means of striving towards something beyond the moment, of expressing deep emotion, and of exploring spiritual questions such as the meaning of suffering and one's relationship to the cosmos.