The 5 Rhythms™ are a practice; a moving meditation of listening and following, integrating our physicality, inner awareness, spirituality and feelings. They are a powerful and deceptively simple map for releasing improvised spontaneous movement and dance. This work, also known as The Wave, was developed by Gabrielle Roth over 30 years of teaching experimental dance and theatre in the U.S.A.

At its most basic level the practice offers the benefits of balanced physical exercise. We move through a wave of energy with five modes, or rhythms, of improvised dance. This begins with gentle motion (flowing), gradually increasing the pulse rate (staccato), working up a sweat (chaos), luxuriating in it (lyrical) then coming to a place of positive and conscious relaxation (stillness). This energetic wave is often repeated so that its cyclical nature is truly experienced. Each rhythm catalyses a state of being in you, releasing impulses and feelings, and then moves you on to the next rhythm. There are no steps to learn but each rhythm has a different energetic movement quality. Practice offers the chance to free ourselves from inertia, to shift the habits and attitudes which keep us endlessly stuck in old patterns. To feel our aliveness, discovering ourselves in a practical and non-judgemental way. We all have a deeper intelligence than the one we use in our daily mind.

We are born into bodies that are relatively fluid and free; bodies that express the circulation of life force through movement. As babies, and then through childhood and adolescence we often encounter circumstance and emotion which we are unable to accommodate into this elemental fluidity. In subtle and invisible ways we freeze and harden. Our bodies hold the experience within us, locked up as immobile or stagnant energy. This pattern of holding and hardening becomes habitual. In many ways we feel and get stuck.

The practice of the 5 Rhythms supports and encourages ways in which to free this trapped vitality to give ourselves more movement and more freedom in our lives. The more we can learn how to absorb and digest the power of all our experience the more fully and creatively we can live, the more fluid we become mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually.

In this work you dance what you feel, you are never dancing the ‘wrong’ thing, but are encouraged to feel it, dance it, and eventually, when it changes, let it go. Your unique creativity and gifts are encouraged to emerge from behind your social persona, where they may be hiding.

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