daily dancer practices
Awaken your movement. Discover your joy. Share your findings with the Garden.
The ringshout is a counterclockwise processional dance that was created by African peoples enslaved on American plantations in the South. I have been reimagining and experimenting with it as a spiritual tool for visioning and healing in my fertility for years now.
Soundtrack | Tony Allen Gbedu | Akoko Nante Ensemble Kpanlogo | Sunlightsquare Celebration of Oggun (Trinidadiandeep Remix)
More about the ringshout
Listen to Ringshout Love Consciousness, a fertility sermon about the transcendent power of dancing the ringshout.
The ringshout is a counterclockwise, shuffling dance and prayer ritual that comes from the spiritual practices of enslaved Africans on plantations in the American South. Born out of a need to retain their ancestral belief systems and customs even though the white slave masters forbid them to do so, the ringshout served as an effective mask for their true intentions because to the unknowing observer they were just a bunch of slaves dancing, singing and clapping their hands. However, for those who understood, each rotation around the circle brought them a little closer to their gods, and suspended—if only for a breath—the horrors and tragedies of their current realities. Within its mighty spin the dancers were able to reimagine themselves as free people, and access a sense of power and possibility not physically tangible in their present moment.
Adapted for our modern times, the Ringshout movement practice expands on this process of embodying imagination, reinvention, and prayer and expressing those visions, feelings, and intentions through repetitive movements that are performed in a constant and rhythmic rotation. Through the dance we travel along the circular patterns of the ringshout and discover each movement as a point of reclaimed possibility for what we hope to shift or create in our futures.
We use the physical mantras of our bodies moving through the ringshout to amplify the deepest desires of our hearts. The ringshout is a place to dance and affirm our most audacious, most radical dreams.