10 am – Noon EDT
Gwyn Peterdi
Opening Dance
Gwyn is a founder of New England Circle Dance Camp and Mexico Circle Dance Festival, and is a featured teacher at hundreds of workshops from pure Circle Dance to the healing arts to Permaculture, as well as the Festival del Verano en Argentina and the Econtro Brasileiro de Danças Circulares in Brasil. She has helped thousands of people find joy through movement, and encouraged and trained many to become teachers and share this amazing art. She has a BA in Ecology and Health, is a Certified Massage Therapist, a yoga practitioner, a teacher of Paneurhythmy, and many of her choreographies are world-wide favorites.
Kayla Dauphine
Circle Dance Rhythms
Kayla has taught circle dance since 1998. She has studied extensively with folk/circle dance teachers from Europe, South America and the US and completed a two-year training program with Laura Shannon, known worldwide for her pioneering approach to traditional women’s dances as tools for healing and transformation. She has been Neskaya’s Director since 2008 and during this time has organized and taught regular dance sessions at Neskaya and has offered dance programs in other community settings. She handles all administrative tasks for the organization and continues to oversee all Neskaya programming with the support of an all volunteer Board of Directors.
2 – 4 pm EDT
Dancing from Scotland
Rosie Turnbull
Rosie has been part of the Findhorn Foundation since 1981. It was during her Experience Week she was introduced to Sacred Dance, at a time when Bernard Wosien was still visiting regularly. Early on she supported Anna Barton with workshops & trainings in the Community, Ireland and Germany and gradually took over much of Anna’s work when she could no longer travel.
In her role in the Findhorn Foundation’s Outreach Education, Rosie taught Sacred Dance as part of building Group cohesiveness, and sending the energy created through dancing together out as a healing energy.
Brant Bambery
Brant is originally from Edinburgh with a passion for the arts that has accompanied him from an early age. He has a background in Edinburgh festival productions and has taken part in traveling musicals. Brant is a Sacred/Circle Traditional Dance teacher and the founder of “The Centrepiece” sessions, an online Sacred Dance community that began in early 2020. He currently organizes regular events both online and in-person.
In 2018, Brant completed his teacher training with Peter Vallance and Judith Bone, and has since continued his training with other respected teachers such as Gabriele Wosien, and currently with Friedel Kloke Eibl & Saskia Kloke.
Brant has been part of the Findhorn Community since 2015 and is a frequent teacher in Findhorn Sacred Dance sessions. These sessions aim to introduce guests to the experience of dancing in a community and to offer a healing and meditative space through the dances.
Brant is passionate about making Sacred/Circle Traditional accessible to as many people as possible and hopes to share its benefits widely. To learn more about Brant’s events and work, visit his website at www.brantbambery.com
ORIGINS OF FINDHORN SACRED DANCE
BERNARD WOSIEN first met Eileen & Peter Caddy at a Whitsun Conference in Germany in 1975. In Bernard’s words ‘it was indeed a happy coincidence portending to good fortune’. Invited by Peter, and encouraged by his friend Sir George Trevelyan, who had known Bernard as a dance student, Bernard and his daughter Gabriele brought 24 dances ‘to sow seeds of the European Circle Dance tradition in the Findhorn Foundation’. These seeds have indeed taken root, sprouted, and continue to flourish. Literally translated from German, ‘Heilige Tanze’ became known as Sacred Dance, although later Bernard said he would have preferred to call them Holistic or Holy Dances. Some dancers felt ‘Sacred’ might put people off, or were uncomfortable with the word themselves, so they used the term Circle Dance. Now it is widely known in the English speaking world as Sacred/Circle Dance.
Anna Barton was part of those early dance workshops, and devised a comprehensible, accessible code to remember the dance steps, still very much in use today. With her notes, accuracy and attention to detail, the group practiced dances between Bernard’s visits. When Anna offered Findhorn Sacred Dance workshops here and in Europe in the early 1980s, she combined Bernard’s ‘holy’ dances with what was alive in the Foundation – the attunement process, centering and aligning to the Divine, focussing the group energy using a candle and centre piece, building and raising group consciousness. The purpose of the dance was to be inclusive, mutually supportive, holistic, to connect to the earth, spirit and each other. The dancers were not only learning steps, patterns and styles, they were grounding energy, ‘getting into the skin’ of other cultures and traditions. Sacred Dance became a tool to channel healing energy for the dancers, the community and the planet. Anna is well remembered as the person who created Findhorn Sacred Dance with depth and humour, blending the dances of Bernard Wosien with the philosophy and spiritual beliefs of the Findhorn Foundation.
6 – 8 pm EDT
Panel Discussion
Emily Jarrett Hughes
Emily is a dancer, healer, and teacher in the wisdom tradition. She teaches and performs traditional dances as a tool for transformation, drawing upon her in-depth training with Laura Shannon. Through her leadership, the Wisdom Dances Circle meets weekly, at the full moon, and at seasonal celebrations. As a vocalist and percussionist, she has collaborated with musicians to create live music for dance. She has collaborated with other community organizations to use dance to enrich conversations about embodied theology, cosmic evolution, women’s leadership, water, and social transformation. She is endlessly exploring how to give life to traditional dances from a far away place in a way that honors the ancestors and history of the place where she lives, Mni Sota Makoce (Minneapolis), “where the waters reflect the heavens,” in the traditional territory of the Dakota. Emily invites you to follow her blog at wisdomdances.com. She is very excited to be launching a new organization dedicated to community, creativity, and contemplation called the Eye of the Heart Center.
Evi Beck
Evi has been teaching Sacred Circle Dance for the past 20 years following a long career in university teaching—she holds two Ph.D.s in literature and in clinical psychology. Sacred Circle Dance changed her life path. She found the dance when she was still a professor of women’s studies and in training to become a psychologist, but once she experienced the healing powers of the dance she decided to dedicate her life to bringing the healing power of the dance to multiple communities and even into academic disciplines, most recently holistic aging. She has been leading a zoom dance circle twice a week since the beginning of the pandemic, and has recently started an in person dance circle again. Her website is at http://evibeck.com.
Christine Read
Christine is a circle dance teacher from Western Australia. She has been teaching for the last 15 years, mostly in Perth, Western Australia, and occasionally in South Australia and Tasmania whenever she’s been able to travel there. At the end of 2016 she sold her home on 27 acres in the Australian bush, retired from her day job, and became a dancing nomad. From 2017-2019 she travelled to UK and Europe for 6+ months each year, mainly to attend circle dance workshops and retreats with as many of the best teachers as possible. She teaches a variety of dances – lively, fun, slow, meditative, moving, modern and traditional. She also teaches some of her own choreographies, as well as others from Australian choreographers, and many that she has collected during her travels.
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