Dance of Chaos

​Bursting with gratitude.

Last night was a really interesting experience teaching EnTrance 5Rhythms at Zetland. I got to ride chaos in a whole new way.

The hall is dilapidated. Absolutely. There are roadworks and demolitions happening all around it, so dust needs to be dealt with, there's a couple of ancient airconditioners that sound like 747s landing and the varnish on the floor has seen better days. It's one of those places you really don't want to look too hard in any of the corners. If I had OCD I would never choose it, and even the chaos bunny that I am has to squint to get past some elements of it. But it's perfect in other ways; there's a (slightly out of tune, but charming) piano, we can play loud music until 10pm, there's parking, it can hold 70 people and... well... it's ours.

In Vision Quest, when Protectors are helping Questers choose their site, we often see flustered humans running around in indecision for hours trying to find the perfect site that feels sacred.

We say to them that we make an area sacred by doing our work there. The word sacrifice comes from the root of sacred. When we heal we sacrifice our energy, sweat and tears, surrender our commitment to clutch onto our stories, slicing our palms open as we hold them closer than any lover. We give up control and move into the mystery, and the parts of us that are ready to die lay down in the bloody dust and salty rain of our endlessly breaking hearts. Breaking open. We sacrifice ourselves, over and over, and we make sacred the very ground upon which we dance.

I feel like every EnTrance class we do exactly that in this daggy hall. I can overlook the ragged edges of our little space, because what happens in its rough bosom is so profound, so defiantly incredible, it is an act of supreme rebellion in the company of strangers who are family yet to be met, but known innately, or we would not feel safe enough to do the thing we do.

Last night chaos broke me open.

I arrived at the hall early, as my amazing boss crew daddy had something on and couldn't make it. So it was just me for set up. At the front door I gagged... whoever had hired the hall last weekend had left it in an appalling state. The bins outside were overflowing, bags of rubbish strewn and torn open with rotten crab claws and chicken bones everywhere. The stench was unbelievable. It smelled like the decaying corpses of zombies littered the sidewalk.

I panicked. I can't hold a class here. I rang council and left two horrified messages, staring in dismay at what would greet participants, knowing that even if I moved some of the rubbish I could do nothing about the smell. For a second I thought about cancelling the class.

But then I saw that sometimes, in life, we have to breathe scents we don't like. Death smells bad. It's something our culture rejects in our sanitised lives. But it's there, maggots and all, and it's where we are all going. To let go, really let go, I have to let go into that realisation. It's a part of life. Death life death, the great oroborous, endlessly eating its own tail, revolving through the mystery, one scale at a time.

I’d chosen to run classes in a less than perfect hall. That’s my chaos. Most of the time it works, but his time there were consequences, and it was up to me to mitigate them. Gulp.

I moved what garbage bags I could and swept up the crab claws and chicken bones so at least the participants wouldn't trip over them, frantically called friends for sage so the hall would be clear, and got to the business of setting up, sweeping and mopping with extra care because the inside needed TLC as well.
The next part of my chaos revealed itself. There is a fragrant fragment of kryptonite in my life, bouncing around the sphere of me like a strange attractor, and at times I find myself oddly, beautifully distracted. Three weeks ago I scraped a car with my bus and that moment of inattention cost me $850. This time it showed up as a complete inability to make any kind of playlist for my 3 hour trance class.

Usually I create a playlist which I then discard as the room goes in whatever direction it needs to. But it's there, as a framework, or a backstop. Safety net. Territory to stray from, and come home to as required.

This time, I'd sat at my laptop for hours and... nothing. Mush. I'd thought to work on it again by setting up the hall early and then nailing it. But all my time was spent dealing with the zombie corpses. And now people are arriving and I just have to pull something together. Get over yourself, Gi. You have a laptop full of music and no excuses. Go.

I DJ'd the whole 3 hour thing completely unscripted, which is utterly nervewracking when there are more than 50 people in process. It's a big responsibility, and a track that doesn't work can snap people out of the delicate constellation of forces it takes for them to get to the threshold of their own personal doorway, that place they've been working up to finally stepping through, whatever it is. It's different for every person. My job is to watch the door. What happens on the other side is none of my business. But holding open the door and keeping the environment safe, is.

For me DJing in this way is like being at the centre of a huge web, where every person is a strand, and I need exquisitely poised feelers receiving what's tugging, in all the directions, so I can choose the music that will open these doors, not close them. And then the little red light starts blinking to say there's only 30 seconds left on this track and I still have no idea where to go and with 5 seconds to go drop in something that will either be disastrous or perfect and it's in the lap of the gods which way it's going to go.

The whole time I had a voice saying... you're fucking it up, Gi.

Thankfully, blessedly, I have incredible teachers. OMG I am so grateful. 5Rhythms produces humans capable of riding storms. All the invisible lessons from hundreds of dance floors are just there, flowering in my body when needed. The teachers who took me through those spaces have their hands at my back, their roots grounding me, their wisdom in the spaces between the notes, and I can lean back into that wisdom and support and trust. Trust the process, trust the lineage, trust the room, trust myself, trust my instincts, trust that it will be perfect no matter what.

And what happened was one of those electric classes. I surrendered, and was danced. I felt like we were one organism with many arms and legs and hips and hearts, all dancing our own part of a bigger whole that we can feel but never truly understand. I played piano at the end of the first wave and for almost ten minutes the room truly danced to it. Instead of people sitting down like it's a performance, they flowed and dived and floated and I thought I was going to die with joy.

The second wave was deep trance. Timeless, relentless, painful, uncomfortable, ecstatic, that space we all know through our DNA in hidden memories of our ancestors' ancestors dancing around fires while different stars turned in the ancient indigo bowl of sky. Clive drummed us forward and backward in time. It took forever and was done in a heartbeat. At the end we breathed together and then sat together, with the space open for anyone to say anything they needed to feel complete. Some things were said, and then we just sat. Together.

For me the feeling of communion was palpable. If felt like none of us wanted to leave. I certainly didn't. We had made sacred. Danced through the rotting corpses, the muck and the mire, the fire of our own commitment, giving up our sweat and our stories, trusting each other, breaking open and in and through, touching the silence that is what we truly are and fuck I love it, I love it so much, I have tears writing this, I feel so blessedly lucky to be able to share these spaces where we are all each others' teachers, all learning together, in such a simple ceremony. Moving what is true. Just that. Moving what is true.

And although my ego wants to get personal and cling on a bit and say ooh, that was me, I know it's not true. All I did was get out of the way. We did that. It did us.

I thank, deeply, profoundly thank my teachers in the dance. Jonathon A Horan, Kate Shela, Tammy Burstein, Peter Fodera, Alain SilverOwl, Sarah Pickford, Martha Peabody, Karen Ritscher, Evangelos Diavolitsis, Lucia Rose Horan Drummond, Jason Rowe, Silvija Tomcik, Lina Nahhas, Guillaume Laplane, Rivka Worth, Adam Barley, Michelle Mahrer, Sue Andersen, Naomi Lishman, Jo Cobbett, Amber Ryan, Geash Bowler, Honor Morningstar, Belle Power, Michellina Ballerina, Kiaora Fox, David Juriansz, Meredith Davies, Natalie Poole, Lucine Eusani, Detchema Sonter and all the teachers in my training year, Catriona Mitchell, Nilaya Sabnis, Thais Sansom, Laura Branco... I can't list you all, but you know who you are, I can feel you all out there on the great web, weaving your own strands, and I love you so much right now. To all the dancers, either in my classes or in the room while I dance, for showing me myself in every facet and breath. Clive for the drums. Morgan Rae for holding the structure, Arthur Retiz, for all the unseen things, and of course, the mama herself Gabrielle Roth and her great love Robert Ansell for more than I could ever say.
​
So.
Fucking.
Grateful.