Hold my hand: A somatic analysis of Sacred Circle Dancing

In a recent ethnographic study of Sacred Circle Dancing, I noticed that prominent circle dancing websites focused on its meditative and community-building aspects, whilst distinguishing features of practice – circling, handholding, centring and the sacred – remain mostly unaddressed. Developed in 1976 for Findhorn’s spiritual community in Scotland, Sacred Circle Dancing is usually considered from a folk roots perspective. What might somatic analysis offer Sacred Circle Dancing? In their editorial note to the Journal of Dance & Somatic Practices (6:1) on dance and somatic practices across cultures, Sylvie Fortin and Andrée Grau describe a prototype for somatic analysis that uses embodied methodology and challenges logocentric ways of knowing. I argue that somatic analysis excavates a spectrum of values embedded in practice, vital for the ethnographer in understanding why a group chooses a particular dance form. In the case of Sacred Circle Dancing, a contemporary discourse emerges engaging intimacy, culture and identity, ecology and the sacred, suggesting that the practice addresses these needs.

Disruptive Intersection

This chapter explores the movement and recoalescing of eight essential elements into the African Religion Complex (ARC), thus enabling the Hoodoo religion to emerge briefly: counterclockwise sacred circle dancing; spirit possession; the principle of sacrifice; ritual water immersion; divination; ancestor reverence; belief in spiritual cause of malady; and herbal and naturopathic medicine. Something resembling Hoodoo developed among the first generation of culturally diverse Africans born in the North American colonies. Enslaved Africans manifest a range of responses to contact with both slavery and Christian worship. But whenever they worshipped, these children of Africa expressed spiritual emotion in bodily patterns inherited from African traditional religion. The primary African components from which Hoodoo would be constituted were drawn from a range of different African ethnic cultures that stretched from the area now known as Senegal down the West African coast to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.