What Is Biodanza?
Biodanza is a way of moving that aims to help you feel more alive — within your body, with other people, and ultimately in your everyday life. A facilitator guides a carefully planned sequence of simple dances to chosen music: some lively and enticing, some tender and slower, some, in turn, deeply relaxing and restful.
Invitations to dance may be solo, in pairs, or with the whole group moving together. There are no steps to learn, and no talking while the music plays, so you can be fully present to experiment with and express how each track makes you feel in that moment.
Ask experienced facilitators what Biodanza is and you'll hear many different answers, depending on their background and experience. Ask me a few years apart and you may hear another version — and mine certainly varies with whom I'm talking to! Ask some participants, and they may simply smile and say: “Well, you just need to try it!” That's part of what makes it so fascinating — and so difficult to pin down 😊
Where it comes from
Biodanza was created in the 1960s by Rolando Toro Araneda, a Chilean psychologist and anthropologist. Out of his deep respect and love for life, he developed a progressive way of relearning to live a naturally better life — physically, socially, emotionally and mentally — through music, movement, connection with others, and reconnecting with our human journey on Earth.
The name came in 1976: bio, from the Greek bios (life), and danza (Spanish for dance). Hence Biodanza means the Dance of Life, with its integrative moments, full of meaning. Its official definition still remains a bit of a mouthful: “a system of emotional integration, organic renewal and re-
Emotional integration
Biodanza invites us to explore moving in different ways to different kinds of music, with one aim: bringing what we sense, feel and do… back into fluid harmony. This gently reawakens our natural, instinctive, joyful desire to move spontaneously when we feel safe and uplifted. We develop the ability to tune into ourselves and our surroundings a little differently, or more deeply. Session by session, Biodanza helps us reconnect how we feel with what we do & how more aware we can be, when we do this with feedback.
Isn't doing what we love the very essence of feeling and moving as one? Above all, Biodanza encourages us to put heart into how we move — and to discover a more authentic body language for ourselves.
A little science, for the curious
Modern neuroscience now broadly supports what Rolando sensed all those years ago: emotion and movement are closely linked in the brain, through regions such as the limbic system and the hypothalamus, which help regulate both our emotional and bodily states.
Besides our five familiar senses, we now know that our bodies are also full of tiny sensory receptors that help us “make organic sense” of ourselves. Some tell us what's happening deep inside the body (interoception), others where we are in space (proprioception), and others when something hurts (nociception). Meanwhile, “mirror neurons” fire when we watch others move nearby — one reason we can attune to the people dancing around us, and -
For just one more very different perspective, have a look here on Paola Biodanza’s website
Some background
