NEWS FEATURE: Sacred Dance Guild melds prayer with movement

c. 1998 Religion News Service SALT LAKE CITY _ Annette Kearl’s face has a look of rapturous abandon as she joyously beats a large taiko drum with sticks representing greed, anger and ignorance. Carla DeSola drapes herself in a blood-red coverlet, suggesting the flames that engulfed a medieval mystic burned for heresy. Rebecca Wright Phillips […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

SALT LAKE CITY _ Annette Kearl’s face has a look of rapturous abandon as she joyously beats a large taiko drum with sticks representing greed, anger and ignorance. Carla DeSola drapes herself in a blood-red coverlet, suggesting the flames that engulfed a medieval mystic burned for heresy.

Rebecca Wright Phillips crouches in the posture of agonized death until her pioneer dress is violently ripped away to reveal a white-robed evanescence. Danny Hinds pounds out African beats that swell into a crescendo of feet-stomping, hand-twisting, pelvis-shaking ecstasy.


These were among the moments culminating four days of learning to dance God’s praises during the annual convention of the Sacred Dance Guild, a national organization founded in 1958, which met this summer on the University of Utah campus here. More than 250 participants, mostly women, came from across the United States to explore the spirituality of the body and to integrate movement and prayer.

Some came to study liturgical dance specifically used in Christian services. Others sought the traditions of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

All wanted a way to use their bodies to approach God or the godly.

Many, like Sue Carter, the convention’s Salt Lake organizer, were trained dancers who had moved on to marriage or other careers. Now the mother of five, Carter dances her faith for St. Ambrose Catholic Church.

It has been said that sacred dance is inherently conservative, replicating exactly movements and sounds and rituals from the past.

At this convention, there were many examples of dance drawn from such ancient traditions: Japanese Buddhism, Navajo, African and Calypso drumming, Spanish flamenco dancing and Sufi spiritual dance.

But dance can also be innovative, allowing individual expression to flourish. The convention featured the New Zealand’s Lord’s Prayer in dance and participants danced the stories of biblical and historical women, such as Eve, Ruth, Mary and Teresa of Avila.

At one workshop, DeSola stood before about 25 pairs of women and softly issued instructions. “Your breath is the connection to the soul,” she tells them. “Your spine is like the tree of life.”


Hold each other in prayer, she says. Create your own psalms of movement.

One partner, with eyes closed, outstretches her hands toward heaven, reaches, then bends toward the floor in humble supplication, swaying and enfolding limbs, almost touching.

Then the roles are reversed as the other partner voicelessly expresses her conversation with the divine.

“Spirituality is like a fountain from within, opening up and out,” DeSola says soothingly.

Throughout history, the dance of worship has been a way to merge time, space and energy, arousing the emotions and engaging the gods.

Hindus believe that Shiva, one of their most prominent gods, dances to create cosmic harmony. Hopi Indians use gestures, clothing and face paint to add potency to their prayers. Sufi dancers whirl themselves into a trance. Shakers once combined dance with speaking in tongues.

In the Bible, King David dances before the ark of the covenant. Psalm 149 says, “Let them praise his name with dancing,” and so the Jews celebrated a good harvest.

Some say the early Christian communities continued the tradition of dancing worship until Christianity became the official faith of the Roman Empire. Then, however, notions of the body and soul being separate spheres crept in.


“St. Augustine and the early church fathers introduced the suspicion that the body is evil,” DeSola said.

The word _ or doctrine _ became primary. Dance became associated with pagans and the profane, erotic and frightening.

Though dance continued in underground Christian communities, it mostly became the language of outcasts. Flamenco dancing, for example, was associated with the Gypsies of Spain.

“It is an intense, passionate expression of a persecuted people,” said Sandra Riveria, a workshop leader who danced for 12 years with New York’s Ballet Hispanico. “It combines human suffering and hope.”

Now flamenco is a way to help Spanish immigrants “feel connected, to forget their place as outsiders in the dominant culture,” Riveria said. “It helps them find a place of joy.”

Today there is a flowering of interest in sacred dance, with layer after layer of cross-cultural pollination.


“There is no profane dancing in Africa,” said Danny Hind, who has a dance company in Chicago called Sundance. “Dance is always sacred and always has a purpose. It is to honor the giver of life and the protector of life.”

People dance together to celebrate the harvest or freedom or community. They mark life’s passages, such as birth, naming, initiations into adulthood, healing, wedding and death. In Africa, Hind said, everyone dances.

In many cultures, worshippers become unified through movement.

In Kearl’s taiko drumming, derived from Japanese Buddhism, that is precisely the goal. The drum is integral to the dance, not an accompaniment to it. Drummers beat in unison, with hand movements symbolizing infinity, among other concepts. As the pounding rhythm builds to a frenzy, the technique becomes effortless, leaving the mind to soar.

“When you are drumming, you feel connected to each other,” said Susan Pedelek, a lay Catholic from Chicago.

“You feel the rhythm of the universe,” she said. “It puts you in another state of awareness.”

DEA END RNS

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