Dance: Do It For Your Spirit And Free Your Soul
“Our modern Australian society is really about conditioning us to be good little minions. Produced for the Empire. Right? Children dance naturally. You know, put music on and you see the little babies bopping around in their high chairs. It's all around us, everywhere. We see it. But then we go to school and we're taught to sit up straight, hands on heads, sit in your chairs, study, absorb intellectual knowledge… intellectual ideas for six hours a day. Then we break. We're allowed out for sports. Which is, you and I have had some discussions about sport, it's good. It moves the body. We like sport… but it moves the body in very particular ways, which are about an external goal, achieving an external goal. So winning.”
In this episode of the show I speak with Sara Bonnar who has danced and taught Tango both here in Australia as well as overseas. She shares her thoughts on dance as a tool for freedom and greater connection to the inner spirit, as a way to contact and even heal the soul within….
If you’d like to check out Sara and her work you will find something at her website www.dancegrammar.com.au
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Episode Transcript
Karen
Hello everyone, thank you for joining me on the Soulful and Wild show. This is episode 19 and as you can see I have Sarah Bonnar with me. Sarah is, well I'm going to say she's an international dancer because I know that she has danced overseas and is a mad dance lady. So Sarah, thank you very much for joining me.
Sarah
Thank you so much for having me.
Karen
Now where do we even begin talking about dance? You know that the purpose of this podcast is to tap into, you know, practical spirituality - the things that we can do and use, to enhance our spiritual path. I mean, dance is something that's so integral to spirit, and I thought you'd be the perfect person to speak to about that because I know your passion is profound.
Sarah
Thank you. I love to talk about dance and spiritual things.
Karen
It's a perfect connection I think. Beautiful. Now full confession, we did attempt to do this, or we did actually do this interview a couple of weeks ago, and we had such a challenge with the internet the we decided to do this in person. It is the first time I've ever done it like this so it's a bit of a a trial!
Now, in terms of your journey with dance, and I know that you, I mean, it's it's really a spiritual thing for you, isn't it?
Sarah
Yes. Yeah, it is.
Karen
Where do we begin? Do we look at, you know, your start with dance, how that happened? Where do you want to begin?
Sarah
I wonder if we could maybe talk about dance in general… I think it's something that is integral to humanity. If we look into ancient cultures, if we look into modern indigenous cultures, dance is everywhere. Except possibly some industrialized or displaced cultures like Australia… Coming back to dance helps us to come back to our heart to achieve you know a higher coherence, which is just a fancy way of saying being able to feel again.
Our modern Australian society is really about conditioning us to be good little minions. Produced for the Empire. Right? Children dance naturally. You know, put music on and you see the little babies bopping around in their high chairs. It's all around us, everywhere. We see it. But then we go to school and we're taught to sit up straight, yep, hands on heads, sit in your chairs, study, absorb intellectual knowledge… intellectual ideas for six hours a day. Then we break. We're allowed out for sports. Which is, you and I have had some discussions about sport, it's good. It moves the body. We like sport… but it moves the body in very particular ways, which are about an external goal, achieving an external goal. So winning.
03:41.46
Karen
Yes. As opposed to dance. Being the best.
Sarah
Being the best. Yes. Dance, which is about going inwards and feeling. Now, I've got to say, up front, there are two kinds of dance. Yep, and like hundreds and thousands of kinds of dance. There is as many people as there are on the planet as kinds of dance that there are. But largely there are two kinds of dance. We've got the kind of dance that everybody knows and is afraid of, which is designed as part of, it is taught empirically, right. To learn how to improve and be the best and perform. Yeah. Perform. Which is, nothing wrong with it, right? It's a fantastic thing to study, a fantastic thing to do. It's dance. But it's also one of the things that stops people from thinking of themselves as dancers. Once it's been, you know, trained out of us, like in primary school,
So many people never come back to it because they look at, the dance that they can see on stages or television, or even TikTok, lots of that going around - and it doesn't relate to them at all. If we look at the dance that's taught in schools, it's kind of about puberty and brings very uncomfortable boys and girls together to do very uncomfortable things at a very uncomfortable time in their life.
Karen
Like touching.
Sarah
Like touching. Like doing the heel and toe polka. Things that don't, I mean, I don't know if we do heel and toe polka anymore.
Karen
I don't know.
Sara
But we did.
Karen
Yes, we did.
Sara
And it's enough to put people off, and especially boys. It's enough to put people off dancing because everything about it is uncomfortable. Whereas, you know, you've learned how to play sport and the rules are obvious and it's straightforward.
It's such a loss to our life… because if we dance, we can feel ourselves. If we dance freely, we can also feel others in a comfortable, safe space, and learn to respond to the nuances of their movement and read how they feel and things like that.
So in my training, I've trained in the first way and now I'm unpacking all of that training to find myself, using dance as a spiritual tool, and as you say, to come back to my centre to
feel my feelings, to feel subtleties in in like energy, not just people, but I use it a lot for that…
Karen
And it can be a real release, can't it. I mean, I Im know just speaking basically and practically, but you know, during that COVID period, I was working from home, actually in this space, and I was doing counselling online with people - and it was a difficult time - I was quite isolated. Normally working as a professional counsellor, if you work for, say, a community service organisation, there's going to be somebody to debrief with if it's required. So I was really out on my own then and one of the things that I did do was to play a track between clients. Or if I had a really tricky, heavy-duty client, I would put a dance track on and I'd turn it up really loud and dance around my lounge room, and then go write my notes and get ready for the next client. It was a very powerful tool for me, to ensure I remained okay, because I was alone during that time… totally isolated actually.
Sara
That sounds like it was challenging but that you found dance as a tool to help you through that.
Karen
It was fantastic. Yeah. So that's the reason I say I imagine it would be a release in some ways. Is that how you see that when you talk about and feeling your feelings?
Sara
Very much so. So many things, so many experiences that we have, we collect. We move through childhood, adulthood, all of the experiences we have. If we can't intellectualize them, and most things we can't, we store them.
… The body keeps the score. It's a fantastic book. Vessel van der Kolk. But we, the energy of our experiences, our emotions that we are discouraged generally from feeling, let alone expressing, are trapped in our bodies, trapped in the tissues of our bodies and it's sometimes really, really hard to access what they are, to release them, to understand them. But dance can help us do that. So we might just feel something in the body and if we can move while focused on that feeling, it can go. We don't even have to think about it. We don't have to name it. We just... can move the energy and help that shift.
Karen
Yeah. Yeah.
Sara
You can get as deep as you like or just, you know, dance is also fantastic for celebration, right? So not just the cleansing between clients or moving the difficult emotions, but to be together in a group and dance together. They call it entrainment. It's about moving together as a group, and we've used it from the beginning of time to cohere society's communities. The communities that dance together come together, maybe… there's archaeological evidence that people danced They found trodden down land at the same places they found bone flutes from prehistory. So we've been doing this for a long time. It's just that we're kind of in this weird place. And you know we met, Karen and I met at a weekend with David Holmgren of Permaculture. What David said, which just like clicked a bunch of things into place for me, was that we came over from England, we, you know, white Australia, the beginnings of white Australia, came over from the city where we were in prison for trying to feed ourselves - essentially stealing, and put into this place where we, not only didn't know how to farm this land, we didn't know how to farm right? I think it's the same with dance in Australia. We moved from our small communities on the land where we probably danced into big cities, "the dark satanic mills”, as they say, and lost that connection to each other.
Karen
And to the earth.
Sara
And to the earth. Very much so. And then we were brought over here, went, yeah, we have to build a society. So we're learning more, right? As, you know, people have been coming from places like where they still dance and also now starting to really value Indigenous wisdom. I went to a workshop a couple of years ago where I think it was the Wirradjuri Mob, did some dances and shared them with us and it was so wonderful to see this little tiny kid, like two, just dancing with his people, you know, not getting it right, which at the time, you know, oh my God, because I studied ballet, right? Ballet is about doing it right, doing it better, doing it harder. And kind of, I went, this kid doesn't know what he's doing, and that's the point. He's doing it with his people. It's not performance. It's a being. I went, I need to learn this stuff. Yeah.
13:30.36
Karen
Yeah, it's very special. I've seen that also. I lived on the Tiwi Islands for a while, in the Territory, so I've been blessed also to see dance happen in that way… To add in to what you said, the local people, they have a particular animal, like crocodile for example, and they dance with the movements of that animal, which connects them profoundly with that that creature and that place that they are on.
Because country is everything for them. So I hear what you're saying and yes, it does deepen the connection. It gives place. It gives you a sense of belonging and makes sense of things. It's powerful...
I remember going to a sacred chant retreat in Mullumbimby with Miten and Diva Premal, I loved it so much that I went a couple of years in a row. The singing and the harmonising… the men singing, then the women singing.. and just using those sacred sounds. It dropped some incredible shit. I could feel it like bits of armour falling off me over those days and interspersed with this, the chanting and dancing - they were Dances of Universal Peace I believe. It was fascinating, because over that period of time, you know, you you start to relax, you start to come home to yourself, just like you're talking about with the movement and the dance, and when we were doing those dances, part of it was we had to look into each other's eyes and acknowledge our partners.. that was so profound for me. I found that deeply transformative. To actually be seen, in a sacred space. It was a very safe space.
I wonder with your extensive experience with dance, and in particular with Tango, which I know was a passion for you for a long time, how that being seen, what is the impact for you when you dance that kind of dance? How does that affect your spirit? Could you speak to that?
Sara
I want to acknowledge what you said about dropping your armour first of all, because that is the magic of dance, that's the medicine of dance. What we strive for with healing is dismantling this armour so that we can flow with the energy of the universe so we can feel what's going on. So there's a couple of different ways of being seen. The first way is the way I was trained, which is to be seen by an audience, which is armour. We pack it on, pack it on. want make sure it looks perfect and that has really, yeah really shaped my self-perception. I saw myself from outside myself for a really long time, rather than from behind my eyes. Coming back to dance is bringing me back to learning to be seen as myself, not as the performer, not as the entertainer. Coming back to trusting that I'm enough yeah by de-armouring. Because in inside that armour, that's all that, you know, the ‘I'm not good enough’, and ‘I am imperfect’ stuff. And that's actually fine. Who here is perfect? So tango has the ability to do that, but when I say seen like through eyes, but to be seen through your soul. With tango, It's a dance where two people move as one and it's improvised. There are no set steps. There's no choreography. You can dance tango in that first way as a performer. You can improve and, you know, be be that person. But the tango I love is social tango. it's We get together as community and we dance together in part and part, we dance together with strangers. Yeah. Moving together as one. yeah Improvising. Wow. So that takes, you know, you can do it with training, with your armour on. You can absolutely do it that way. But the best answers for me have been when I let it all go and I trust it.
Karen
Yes, the T word.
Sara
The big T word.. Yeah, because you require the trust. Yeah. The leader, the divine masculine, is the person responsible for the dance, for keeping the partners safe, both partners, themselves and their followers safe, and all the other dancers on the dance floor, not bashing into anything; for suggesting the direction, suggesting the rhythm, the timing, the musicality. The follower, the divine feminine is the receptive person, the person who says, yes, I accept that. Or, you know, also I don't accept that. You can also know and exercise your boundaries and go, that's not, no, that doesn't feel comfortable for me… to have the dance, you have to agree. I'm going to lead. I'm going to follow. Be in that centred space within yourself. Each of those roles is very distinct and they come together with a synergy so that it's beyond just the music and the partnership.
The most incredible experiences I've had have been with like a huge group of people, an amazing leader, an orchestra, a live orchestra. So in Argentine tango, you dance to a lot of old recordings of tango music from the golden age of tango, but sometimes you have live orchestras that play arrangements of familiar songs in different ways. So rhythms, the beat's not exactly where you expect it to be. But because my partner and I were so connected, and it has been a stranger in many cases, because we're so connected, when the music is different to where I expect it to be, we're still on it. We're still with it. We tap into something. We tap into this universal consciousness or whatever, and have this peak flow experience with ourselves, with each other, with the dancers on the floor, with the musicians, with the music, with all of it at once. And it's just amazing. Like a heart-opening experience.
23:10.07
Karen
It's fantastic when you describe it like that because, and I mean, you mentioned that permaculture thing earlier. I remember when I was doing that course, that permaculture course with Rob at TAFE, he had all these golden bits, yellow wool basically, and he had all these animals and all these trees and all these different things, pictures of them on the table, and we had to place these threads between these different elements, this animal, that one, that one….and what we ended up with was this incredible web, like a golden web.
When I think about the Tarot when you read the Tarot or when you're doing healing work with someone, or even, you know, if you're having really good sex, for example, you know, you're tapping into this universal web and that's really what you're describing, I think - we are all within this incredible energetic field and everything's in it. Yeah, and when we are fully present with it, that's when everything works. That's what you're describing.
Sara
Absolutely. Absolutely. I love this. It's exactly you exactly what you're saying. the Quantum physics is coming up with this. They're calling it the quantum field. I mean, yeah yes, sure. People call it God. like There's all kinds of names for it. But it's a thing that exists that we have to experience. It's not just... you can't experience it intellectually. That's right. It's a feeling that we have to get past the armour. We have to use whatever tools we've got to get past the armour so we can, you know, have conversations like this that give you goosebumps. It's such pleasure. Yeah. It's... it is amazing and you're right, it's definitely about dropping that armour because when we open up and we're talking about dance through movement, we get lost in that, we become free, special connections with individuals, whether it's on the dance floor in other ways, safe spaces, and we do.
Karen
I feel like our - it's almost like our atoms begin to, you know, there's space between them and suddenly, almost unexpectedly, you're in it, and that's where the magic is. So, yeah. So, we know what it is now. So, thinking about that, I know that you've got some different things that you're cooking up at the moment, and one of the things I'm really interested in is um, pausing, thinking, hang on a moment. I know that we've sat together by your fire and chatted and spoken about the dance with no name, right?
When we had that conversation, I felt really inspired about the possibilities for that dance. My sense about it was that you are working, and correct me if I've got this wrong, but my sense was that you are working on a pathway for people to actually move so that they can almost tap into that state themselves in a kind of like, a supported group, like a workshop-y sort of thing. Did I read that right?
Sara
Yes, yeah that's exactly what I'm attempting to do. It's based on tango. Tango has a long history of codes impressions that people have of it, which many people are attracted to. Many people are drawn to it and it attracts a lot of men relative to other dance forms.
Karen
We like men dancing
Sara
Yes we like men dancing, we think men should dance more because it helps with empathy, because it helps with this de-armouring. We think dance is good for all people, especially men. It is maybe not so attractive to some people for whom that is not their primary culture. It's from Argentina and it's not necessarily what some people are attracted to. And end also, I'm an Australian person. I have grown up here and other places but I always felt a little bit weird saying I'm an Argentine tango dancer. So, the dance with no name. It takes that dance and uses the parts of it that help connection and focuses on the connection. Yeah, and also the lead and follow can be swapped. The lead is always going to be divine masculine. The follow is always going to be divine feminine. But as a woman, I can dance as a leader. I can embody that divine masculine and vice versa. So it's not it's on gender the way that Argentine tango often is. I went to a level of milongo one night in Buenos Aires and I had a couple of American friends who danced swing. Yeah, fantastic dancers. In between sets of tango, Milong is a social dance, in between sets of tango, sometimes they'd have like a bit of music that wasn't tango, and this night there was a swing set. So my two mates got up and had a dance together. They looked incredible. They were having fun. Whey sat down and one of the old milongueros, one of the old dancers came up and said, “ Don't ever do that again in public. Men can't dance together, that's disgusting.” This has gone back a few years and I'm sure it's changed a lot. but to not have to conform to those codes, I think can help open it up for a lot of people. Also, not having to fit the mold of... Not having to wear stiletto heels. Yep. let me put it that way. I don't need to say any more than that…. We don't have to. We can dance where we are. Not having to dance to tango music. You know, not everybody is attracted to the music of the 1940s.
Karen
So, the dance with no name.
Sara
I think... It's the newest social dance in the world because it's the one that you're doing right now.
Tango is a walking dance. It's based on walking, and that makes it very accessible for people. Yeah.
I'm working on developing ways of sharing the movement vocabulary in a way that can be adopted for anybody's culture at any time.
Karen
I know that you're not fussed with videos of dance - you've got that course online, and I know that there's no videos and that is very, very foreign. I know when I looked at the website, I was like, where's the pictures? Like where's the videos on how to do it? It's only as I sort of looked into it more with you that I got that. It's very out there, this idea that there's not going to be videos to show people what it's supposed to look like. It's challenging.
Sara
It's challenging to you because you can look at a video and understand what your body is supposed to do yeah as a dancer. However, there are a lot of people, a lot of men, who have never learned to copy somebody's body movements. They work with words. We've spoken about the intellect, right? So one of the things I learned very early on as a tango teacher was how to use my words because I had a fantastic friend who was really generous with me and spent days, months, years saying, “okay, when you take that step, you look different. Why?” and forcing me to really understand what about my boy biomechanics was different to his biomechanics. So instead of saying yeah, you do it like this, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, actually having to go, “Bend your knee very slightly. Yes. And use the straightening of your knee in a horizontal direction to push you to move forward….”
Karen
Oh, my god I know this one so well. I know this so well. When when you study yoga to teach, yes, a big part of it is actually learning to language the movements and you're facing your students, just like you are when you're teaching tango…learning to verbally paint a picture is a big part of your efficiency as a yoga teacher and that is it definitely a learned skill.
Sara
I have to say it took a very long time to learn, because when I learned dancing, when I learned tango, the first few teachers I had did exactly that, “copy me”, and I could do it because I lived and studied ballet for 13 years, and that was all about, do it like this and with a demonstration - and I went into this first class I was teaching with that and my friend had a bit of a breakdown because he could not copy. He did not have the connection between eyes and dance, right?… I'm … really grateful that that it happened because it's helped me to learn to express how to dance. So this is this is where the concept of dance grammar comes from. This is the language that we use. So to try to reach out to more men… There's so many ways, like so many videos in the world about dancing… I don't need to produce another video of dancing, right? There's nothing wrong with it. A lot of people are learning to dance with it. It's fantastic, nut my special skill set is in using language, so that's what I've created. I'm not happy exactly with where the website is, with where the dance courses dances are, it's an ongoing development. But what I'm excited about for Dance Grammar, though, is that it is a platform for other dancers to come and share their work in language. Yeah, right. And I can help them. If there are dancers in a particular style that want to come and you know understand how to language what they're doing, if that's not their skill, come. If anybody is very good with language and dance, come. You know, we've got a platform. I'm excited for that. YOpportunity for growth.
Karen
We can easily talk about this forever. Yeah, sure. But there is a cake out there, and another cup of tea. Yeah :)
So we've talked about input, like dance for your soul, really.
We've talked about tapping into the web.
We've touched a little bit on your background in Argentina and ballet history and and dance grammar.
So I'm just thinking, what have we not talked about that we need to... and I'm wondering, if somebody wanted to tap in to their essence, to create a space for themselves for dance, what would your recommendation be for them just to get started with themselves?
Sara
Put on some music. That!
My understanding for a very long time about dance is movement to music, and then I started working for a contemporary dance company - no music. But start with music. Put on some music you love, and you know, just unlock your knees, right? Because if we've got our knees are locked straight, we can't use our legs and we can only use our feet to move us around. But if we unlock our knees, then all of a sudden we've got a lot more movement available in the legs - and do it. Nobody's watching. Do it in a way that nobody's watching - and then you can just let go, and be free with it. I use dance for all kinds of things, right? Moving the energy. I was telling you in our first interview about how we had a mini cyclone come through where we live, and I live in a shed and I'm surrounded by gum trees and honestly, I was terrified. It felt like the house was about to lift off like in the beginning of the Wizard of Oz. And I was frozen, thinking that a tree was going to come down on on my little house, and I couldn't move. Then I remembered, I'm a dancer. I can fix this, and just unlocked my knees. Just started moving. Yeah. And but by the time, you know, the wind had passed and the sun had come out again, i was fine. Yeah. I had no trauma embedded in my tissues from that fear, from that experience. Now, you know, also within our little yard, there were no trees down there, so maybe tapping into some of that universal consciousness, bringing that dance in, maybe that kept us a little bit safer. There were trees down all over the rest of the property - but our little yard, nothing. Safe. That was pretty cool.
We had a party, our Solstice Gathering. It was fantastic fun, and... you know, later in the night, we put on some music and got up and just boogied together. It just brings smiles. You know, nobody's judging. Just seeing each other - as you said, looking into each other's eyes as we move, and maybe not as together as one, as though we were all doing. Are we still there together? As ah having a group energy. Yeah. That's right.
Karen
Even when you do ritual work, so women's groups and things like that, that whole thing about moving as a group - you're building energy when you sing, when you move in, you know, that holding hands and dancing around the circle. I've been in spaces where all the women stand in a circle they clap and they sing and then one woman will go into the centre and she'll dance around and she'll say something and all the other women acknowledge that, they all take a turn. So I hear what you're saying about that whole thing about in the group. That's beautiful.
Sara
It's so good, like going back to the beginning of time when we did it because our survival depended on it. Now we can do it because…of the energy.. There's that thing about the sum of the parts …
So I like dancing by myself, that’s one thing, it’s fantastic. Dancing in a group of people, when sharing energy, building energy. Yes.
Karen
And we can create shift. I actually genuinely feel that, I mean places hold energy, we know that and that when you bring a group of people together and there is something like dance and song and and joyful celebration, the place benefits from that being there. It doesn't disappear.
Sara
Absolutely. This is something that we've been working on at home. I live on a my mother-in-law's cattle property and we live in a big shed which have been storing things for a really long time. And we've got big plans for this place. We would love to host people to come and give healing workshops there, but in order for that to happen, we have had to move energy. So we have had a series of gatherings where we have sung together, danced together, made offerings by the fire to move this energy and now you saw on the solstice we've got two new rooms in the shed, we've got a new lounge room. I mean, they don't have walls or anything, but you know the energy is there, it's clean, it's got space to dance, it's space to move. It's exciting when you bring people together, you raise the energy, and the energy knows. It comes and it inhabits.
I also think that by tapping into the land there, I've been able to understand what it is that it wants. Now that's a big call, right? Because that land's been there for a really long time. But through de-armoring, through you know, kind of getting back into my body, getting that healing happening I'm able to connect with the land. I was never raised on the land. i I was a city girl. We moved countries every few years. I lived in ballet studios. So me and nature, you know, I jump at, you know, a piece of grass hitting my leg. But through the dearmouring, I can come back to it. I can be in it. I can now sit and have lizards come and crawl over me and I can have bugs land on me and I'm not afraid of them. So I can feel things so much better. I can feel the land so much better and I can... breathe, because that armour stops you from breathing doesn't it.
Karen
It does, it does. Yes, and I definitely agree with you. I think it's totally normal for us to actually feel the land, and to have that two-way communication with that place, where we are, and we started with this didn’t we.? Yes, we did speak about this earlier. We've definitely had a few chats. I think this morning we have also talked about dance with the Wurrachuk people. Maybe we spoke about it… it’s an integral part of the First Nations people's connection, with dance and the land and, all the things.
I'm getting little diverted now as we have a little puppy joining the situation. So we might wrap it here.
We've talked about quite a few things dance-related;
the importance of using dance
to release tension
dissolve trauma
move storms - all sorts of things.
I'll actually put a link in the blurb about your website so people can go and check that out.
Sarah
I'd also love to offer your listeners, viewers, a half-price access to the current course which is called Dance Together and I think if they use the code soulfulandwild that should be half price for you now, and all the courses when they are there.
Karen
There you go. So the words soulful and the word and, then wild, with no spaces.
Alright thank you very much for joining us and have a beautiful rest of your day!