Most dance in our era is performative, but dance can do so much more. Harlem High School Assistant Principle and dance teacher Kierra talks about dances for healing, transformation, connection, and acceptance.

Alicia Free: Kierra Foster-Ba is a Body Wisdom Coach and New York City dancer who has done some deep work, and her presence is a gift. I am so excited to share Kierra’s voice with you! Kierra dances with Kaeshi Chai and PURE (Public Urban Ritual Experiment) an international organization of artists devoted to using belly dance to promote peace and end suffering. I met Kierra when I was running around wildly putting on a show with Kaeshi. I was hosting 10 performers, managing our band Taksim Ithaca, dancing with the band Beatbox Guitar, coordinating volunteers, buying and hauling concessions up the elevator, and trying to take care of my 3 and 5 year old kiddos at the same time. It was a little intense the way I did it.

When Kierra smiled at me, calm washed over my body. I needed that!

After the show, we took a workshop together with other dancers, writing our intentions in the water in the creek near my home. Letting the water heal us. It was so magical. After that experience opened me up, Kierra mentioned a dance-based meditation practice that she teaches. I relaxed into the most incredible hug with Kierra, and I wanted to know more about how she has cultivated this energy that shines through her. I wanted to share it with you.

Kierra dances for human liberation. She helps us tap into the wisdom of our bodies with dance. To practice deep permission and acceptance. Giving us permission to be both graceful and graceless.

https://youtu.be/30a85_R_XGE

https://youtu.be/uyhs2mNLgyA?t=92

https://youtu.be/qm0cM2fa1ik

Let’s start with the 5Rhythms classes that you’ve been offering in New York City since 2008. Tell us about that Kierra

5Rhythms classes in New York City since 2008

Okay. So I just want to back up a little bit if that’s okay. Cause there are some people who might not be familiar with the 5Rhythms. So I want to give a little bit of a history of the 5Rhythms.

Gabrielle Roth is the founder of this body of work, and she really was one of the pioneers.

Some people say she was the originator. There’s some conflict about that. As it always is, there’s more than one person who’s pursuing something at the same time as someone else. But she definitely was one of the pioneers of what we now call conscious dance. Sometimes people call it ecstatic dance.

In fact, many people who’ve gone on to create their own bodies of work came through her lineage. And so what I know of her story is that she is someone who was a classically trained dancer, and so that informed how she looked at the world and how she observed people. She definitely observed movement, and I like to think of her as a really powerful detective of the heart because she was able to see what was being communicated in the movement.

And as I said, she was a classically trained dancer. Something happened so that she wasn’t going to pursue that as a profession. And so she began to be offered dance related work and all kinds of venues, you know, everything from asylums where people were working through breaks in their psyche to work at Esalen when Esalen was just being founded as this community center for exploration and healing.

5 Qualities of Movement: Flowing, Staccato, Chaotic, Lyrical, Stillness

And so what she discovered is that all movement can be broken down to five specific qualities. Movement is either flowing, meaning it’s continuous. One part of the movement is flowing into the next part.

It’s flowing.

Or it’s staccato, meaning that it’s segmented. It’s very clear. Often there’s a repeated pattern, so you can see, like boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom. Boom, boom, boom.

That would be staccato, right?

It’s percussive, it’s clear, it’s directional.

Or movement can be chaotic, you know, just flailing.

It could be continuous and staccato at the same time, or there can be this light, effortless quality to the movement.

And that would be the fourth rhythm, the rhythm of lyrical.

And the fifth and final rhythm is the rhythm of stillness. And it’s the idea that the dance movement is equally as internal as it is external an expression. So something is happening. And that’s why it’s a meditative practice because when you do the practice.

By the time you get to stillness, you really do feel emptied out.

We call it a wave. You started out flowing. Grounding. It started to get percussive. Maybe a little bit more energetic. The high point would be chaos. When you’re just letting it all go, whatever is in you that’s ready to be released, you are letting it go.

And then after that cathartic movement you do just naturally, and there are physiological reasons for why you feel that -which I’ll talk about a little in a minute- you do feel this sense of ease and lightness, lyrical.

And then when you get to stillness, you feel emptied out. And so that still voice that maybe you don’t always listen to sort of bubbling up from the deepest, wisest part of yourself you now have access to in a different way.

I say that she’s brilliant for so many reasons, but one reason why I say that she’s a detective is because there are physiological reasons for why this works. For one thing each of the rhythms has what she called the gateway or the primary body part that is kind of instigating the movement.

So when you’re in flowing, it’s your feet and it’s the idea of getting as far away from your head as possible, which would be your feet really dropping down into your most instinctual animal self.

Then when you get into staccato, it’s the center of the body, primarily the hips.

When you get to chaos, it’s the head. And in your neck, you have powerful glands that pump you with endorphins. So when you start moving your neck and not keeping it straight the way that we normally do, you stimulate those glands. So on the one hand you are shaking it all out, so you’re resetting your nervous system, which all mammals have access to do.

If you’ve ever seen a mammal that was frightened, and then in order to help themselves get over it, what they do is they start to just shake and that resets the nervous system. So we have the opportunity to reset our nervous systems when we tremble and shake out, but we also are flooding ourselves with endorphins so that the release of whatever it is, frustration, rage, grief, actually after it’s done feels really good to us.

And so then when we’re in lyrical, there starts to be this ethereal quality where you almost feel that powerful connection that you have with all that is. And then of course, you go into stillness, which is the place where you can actually get answers to questions you didn’t know that you had, which is often how I experienced stillness.

You know, sadly it’s never the winning lotto number. Okay. But you know, it’s like all of a sudden something that in the background of my mind, I wasn’t even allowing myself to be conscious of, like a minor worry. All of a sudden the solution is just right there. I didn’t even ask the question.

And the solution is right there. Yeah, when we get still, that’s what happens. So that’s the 5Rhythms.

Taking the 5Rhythms in a Gym

https://youtu.be/0Ge29tf2DJ0

What happened was, I was at a gym where my first 5Rhythms teacher, who was an amazingly brilliant soul it was a gym and God bless her, but she offered the 5Rhythms in a gym.

And it takes a lot of courage because you’re asking people to dance like no one’s looking, but everybody’s looking. Think about most gyms. This is a gym, you know, two of the walls are glass. People are looking in, they’re waiting for their class to begin. They’re like, “What the hell are those people doing?”

But somehow she created a space where we were able to just go for it. So I’m a pretty literal thinker, so I took it as playing. I was like, oh my God. The teacher said, ” Be a circle.” I’m a circle. I’m a circle. The teacher said, “Shake it.” Oh, I’m a washing machine. I’m shaking it oo. Okay. So I was just having fun, you know, like my inner five year old was like, Oh my God, this is great.

And one day I was just shaking like a washing machine.

And the next thing I know I was so filled with like rage and grief simultaneously.

And I’m shaking and my teacher just said, “Keep moving, Kierra, keep moving.” And then I got down on the floor and I was rolling around on the floor, like just shaking and moving and crying and raging, and then it was gone.

So, I don’t know to this day what caused it. But there was something in my muscle memory. There’s something about the position that I got myself in that clearly my animal self had a memory about and it was not a good one. But whatever it was left me. I didn’t even need to understand it.

It just bubbled up, it got released. And this...