This dancing circle is made up of adults with developmental disabilities and the staff who support them. I facilitate it weekly in the multi-purpose room of the human services agency where I work. We’re allowed to hold it here because although it may not fulfill the over-arching mission of community inclusion for all clients, it does meet clients’ personal goals of physical exercise, socialization and participation in the arts. I add to this my own agenda of pursuing peace and understanding through the unifying energy of community dance to music from many countries and many traditions.
Here in the U.S.A. the dancers love Country and other contemporary music, and I’ve become accustomed to weaving their tracks into our sessions. However, I’ve been delighted to find how deeply they appreciate a wide range of music. The rapt attention and ensuing hush when I first played Joanne Shenandoah’s “Birth of Peacemaker” was impressive. No, we don’t do Friedl Kloke-Eibl’s dance to it in this circle, instead a group of participants choreographed their own dance to it, cradling a baby, sewing, and waving goodbye to a child.
The bulk of our fare comes from within the Circle Dance repertoire, sometimes with adaptations. Like most circle dance facilitators, I weave my programs to suit the various abilities of the dancers. In this circle I try to choose, modify or adapt the dances so that they are accessible and not discouraging, while still having some substance and offering a challenge. Because developmental disabilities often go hand-in-hand with physical disabilities, I’ve re-choreographed several dances to be done seated. This is one way of including wheelchair-bound dancers and those who can’t, for other reasons, stay on their feet for a whole hour. We integrate wheelchairs into the dance in other ways, too, connected to neighbors with scarves held by hand or tied to the wheelchair, or parked in the middle to enjoy the energy.
Steiner coined the word “Anthroposophy” to denote his worldview, which drew on the collective wisdom of humankind. Much of that wisdom has been incorporated into dance throughout time and space, so there’s a natural affinity between Anthroposophy and Circle Dancing, reinforced by the firm basis of both in the cycles of Nature.
I was offered a cosmic space to dance in the Village’s central hall, and the services of a live band of talented musicians. We held monthly circle dances involving 60 disabled adults, along with two or three co-workers, in joyous and chaotic versions of Nigun Atik, Kangaleftos, Ena Mythos, Jacu, Tsadik Katamar and The Ash Grove, as well as free dance.
At Camphill, with large circles and two-hour sessions, I was not able to adapt fully to individual needs. My current smaller circle offers the chance for more flexibility and has prompted a weaving together of story and dance in a combination that can fit precisely with the mood of the participants. Last summer, with the temperature in the 90s (F) and humidity to match, we danced dances connected with water and its cooling properties. As we relaxed, visualizing the sun setting over a calm Polynesian sea after a seated version of Bob Minney’s “The Blessing”, I told a Native American story about the origin of a nearby lake. The dancers’ deep attention set me off down the path of story-dance and inspired the content of a series of afternoon workshops for another agency.
Dancing with people with disabilities may not stretch my dancing muscles the way a session with experienced and able-bodied dancers does, but it brings great pleasures and rewards in the form of laughter and smiles on faces that rarely show emotion. It also gives the dancer a chance to appreciate Terry and his tape, the leaves and flowers that Susie arranges for the centerpiece and the opportunity to hold hands in a friendly circle and enjoy moving to the music.
“These are your grandparents”
Julia Lynam
We may not know what we’ve got ‘til it’s gone, but it’s also true that we may not know what we’ve lacked until it’s given to us. The gift I received on a mountaintop in Mexico opened my eyes to something very important that I didn’t know I’d missed and reassured me that it’s never too late to learn about love, life and families.
The long climb up the mountain was exhausting me, and I wondered how Marguerita was managing. Seventy years old and heavily built, surely she would be having a hard time. But as I slogged painfully up over the next rise I heard her soft resonant voice carefully explaining the medicinal use of a particular plant with no hint of breathlessness. No beads of sweat stood on her brown and wrinkled brow and she showed no sign of fatigue despite the stiff three-hour climb that lay behind us.
Marguerita was a shaman who had been invited to our dance camp to introduce us to the ancient ways of the Aztec people and their descendents. The camp comprised thirty people living together for a week in a charming cloistered retreat center in Tepotzlan, Mexico, learning and exchanging a wealth of circle dances from many cultures and many times. With her twinkling brown eyes, full skirts and long gray braid, Marguerita had opened to us the doors of the spirit of this magical place.
At last we all reached the top of the mountain, 7,000 feet above sea level, and we gathered at the foot of the pyramid that crowned the summit. A group of local people was holding a ritual on the very top, the most sacred part of the pyramid, so we halted on a lower platform and danced while we waited. Having no instruments along, we chose dances to which we could sing the tunes, and joyfully danced the Deep Peace of an ancient Celtic blessing and the inspiration of medieval seer Julian of Norwich into the ancient paving stones of the Aztec pyramid.
At last the ritual above was achieved and it was our turn. Marguerita lined us up at the foot of the 13 steps that ascended to the height – 13 being a number of power in the Aztec canon. She decreed that we should be led upwards by the elders among us, those who had reached the age of 52 or older. We were to zigzag up the steps, three to the right, three to the left, three to the right, three to the left and the last step straight up onto the upper platform. Just as we began to move forward a young couple with a baby hurried over. They’d come to the pyramid to name their child. Overjoyed to encounter Marguerita, they asked her to lead the ceremony for them. “Now”, she declared, “the child must lead us up,” for it was only in the absence of children that the elders went first.
Solemnly we processed up the 13 steps, child and parents first, then the eight elders, followed by Marguerita and the remaining dancers. We formed a circle at the top – a natural move for circle dancers – but I was unprepared for the first words the shaman spoke. Staff in hand, she threw her arms wide to indicate the eight elders, then turned to us as she announced: “These are your grandparents”.
I stood silent and stunned as the tears poured down my face. I had never had grandparents; they had all been dead before I was born in 1952.
My paternal grandfather, Henry Patrick Lynam, died in 1910 at the age of 34, a victim of tuberculosis contracted in an English jail were he was imprisoned because of “seditious” articles he had written in the Irish newspaper he edited. His wife, Elizabeth, remarried and fled from Ireland to Wales, where my father grew up in a community fiercely hostile to the family’s Catholicism. She died in 1946.
It was about that time that my maternal grandparents died, too. My grandfather Estyn Comley had been gassed in the First World War. A cavalryman, he’d inhaled the noxious mustard gas as it crept into the Belgian trenches, sowing the seeds of the lung cancer that would kill him thirty years later. My grandmother Blodwen – her name means “white flower” in Welsh – died in 1947 of an aneurysm, which my mother always claimed was caused by a broken heart.
Blodwen had lost one son in infancy, one in a tragic accident at the age of five and her last son, my mother’s twin, to typhus fever caught while liberating Nazi concentration camps at the end of World War II.
Not only had I lacked grandparents as a child, but even the mention of them brought a deathly pall of sadness and bitterness over the house. It was not a subject area into which one ventured willingly in my childhood home.
Yet I interpreted these tragedies as belonging to my parents, never to myself. I had never known, so never lost, my grandparents and I did not suffer their absence as a personal grief. My school friends must have had grandparents, indeed I remember occasional mention of them, but I suffered no jealousy. I took my own situation, as children do, for the norm.
So as I stood on the pyramid, beneath the life-giving Mexican sun, a howl of agony emerged from a pit of emptiness inside my soul as I realized my loss. And the emptiness was filled. It was filled by eight “elders”, smiling dancers, not much older than myself, who embraced me as their granddaughter with love and laughter as I wept my way along the welcoming line.
We moved through the words and motions of our own ritual on that Aztec pyramid, my soul scaling new heights of joy as I was borne upwards on the unfolding wings of realization of the depths of connection that lay within my family for me. I was walking with the spirits.
I remained on the pyramid after my fellow dancers descended, sitting gazing into the far blue Mexican sky and the depths of my joy. A sound of chanting brought me back to the consciousness of my surroundings: the naming ceremony for the child had begun and I was welcomed into the circle. Now Marguerita produced from her bag a wand richly decorated with crystals and feathers, which was passed from person to person, each speaking words over the infant, held in her mother’s arms. I didn’t understand the words, to this day I do not know what the language was, but I understood clearly what was happening. It was a familiar scene, recorded in our folk lore as part of the story of the Sleeping Beauty: at the christening, or naming, of a child, the elders, fairies, spirits or well-wishers gather to bestow blessings upon the child, ceremonially, one by one. The wand passed into my hand. I paused, gazing at the peaceful face of the sleeping infant and wished her what I now knew I had lacked as a child: “Magdalena, I wish you peace and joy, and the knowledge of your grandparents’ love.”
Soon after my pilgrimage to the pyramid my own daughter presented me with the gift of my first grandson and I set about discovering the commitment and magic of grandparenting from the other side. All my grandchildren are precious gifts and I feel especially blessed that I have lived long enough to be a part of their lives.
Somewhere in Mexico is a child who carries my blessing with her; somewhere in the United States are eight elders who link me to my lost grandparents; and here, too, are six souls who have chosen to enter this life as my grandchildren. I am determined to appreciate them in every way possible. Thanks to Marguerita and the spirits of the pyramid, I know the value what I have while it’s still here - while I’m still here!
P.S.
I have since heard of a theory expounded by Albert Pesso that we are born with the capacity to form certain basic relationships: parents, siblings, grandparents, and that although we can survive without developing these capacities, they remain forever latent, a stunted part of our emotional and psychic history, unless they are reawakened in later life.
Neskaya, my dancing home, celebrated its tenth anniversary in the Fall of 2006. Here’s my personal celebration of this extraordinary place:
Ten Years On!
The sun begins to drop slowly behind Sugar Hill in a blaze of glory. A dozen dancers turn to watch the evening star appear among pink and golden clouds. “Shalom Aleichem” strikes up, and, taking hands, the dancers move into the energy of the evening. Through the great western windows the last light of day falls across the centerpiece and a hush descends as the final notes of the music fade into silence. Quietly, the dancers break the circle and move towards the table laden with the food they have brought for a shared supper. The occasion is an “all-day dance,” an unprogramed eight-hour feast of dance and companionship held monthly in what may well be the only custom-built Circle Dance Center on Earth.
There are two stories that Jenny Deupree, its creator, tells about this place called Neskaya, nestled in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I’ve heard them often, but they still bring music to my heart each time she recounts them to newcomers.
The first story tells how after discovering the Hassapiko in a cellar in Paris in 1965, Jenny
danced International Folk Dance for many years, through many dark nights of the soul, always with a lurking feeling that there must be something more to this. During one of those dark times a friend invited her to try Sacred Circle Dancing on the Green in Danville, Vermont. “It was International Folk Dance with a candle in the center,” recalls Jenny. “A light went on for me: of course! This was what was missing.”
The candle symbolized the light of a shared community of Circle Dance, stretching across the ages and the continents, connecting humans with the spiritual aspect of simultaneous movement in beauty with intention.
Years followed in which Jenny held a small, sometimes vanishingly small, circle in the local elementary school in Franconia, New Hampshire. Then, in 1991, her second story goes, she visited a dance studio that her cousin had created in an old barn in Maine. “I looked around at the mirrors and barres and knew that I wanted my own dance studio,” she said. “Not one that looked like this, but one that would be a center dedicated to Sacred Circle Dance.”
Jenny and her then husband Dana Johnson returned home enthused with the idea and began drawing up designs based on sacred geometry. The dream was financed by Jenny’s inheritance from her industrialist grandfather, and part of the lesson of Neskaya is that money is only one factor in generating an energy center.
Eight long years later, Neskaya, a concrete and glass edifice aligned to the directions and constructed of four parabolic arches on a ground plan of an octagon within a dodecahedron, was ready. Since then the spirit of the dance has gathered and multiplied at this place until it has become a fountain of positive energy directed toward healing the planet.
Neskaya’s mission is to promote inner happiness, healthy social connections and world peace through the practice of celebrating our differences. By offering such activities as International Folk Dance, Sacred Circle Dance and Yoga we want to heal the divisions between soul and body, between people of different cultural backgrounds and between human beings and the material body of our planet.
Circle Dancing had come to New England in the 1980s, borne on the wings – or feet - of facilitators like Anna Gahlin and Peter Vallance. Dancers who attended the sessions they taught scattered to set up circles which grew, shrank, flourished, merged, moved, changed and blossomed in the usual fluid dance of such circles, over the next ten years. By 1996, when Neskaya opened its doors, it had been many years since circle dance facilitators from Britain had visited New England. Neskaya stirred the flow, hosting special events led by Judy King, Jan Mulreany, Sue Kewley and James Wilde, Laura Shannon, Peter Vallance, Mandy de Winter, Bethan Freedman, June Watts and Pablo Scornik. A solid regular group of dancers meets every Sunday evening for Sacred Circle Dance and a smaller International Folk Dance group meets every Wednesday evening. Monthly “all-day dances” offer a chance to dance old favorites, practice recently learned dances, ask for help, exchange ideas, feast and watch the sunset together. There’s a lawn for outdoor dancing, and comfortable cheap basic accommodation in the building for overnight stays.
The name of this center carries its own significance: "Neskaya," Jenny explains, “Comes from Marion Zimmer Bradley's science fiction novels about Darkover, a mineral-poor planet where people developed a technology based on the powers of the psyche. This work is mainly done by a circle of people trained in "laran", who learn and practice their calling in a "tower", of which the most famous are Hali, Arilinn, and Neskaya.
“We wrote to Marion Zimmer Bradley to ask get her permission to use the name, which she graciously granted us. Our building isn't exactly a tower, and the energies we work with may or may not be the same as laran, but it is intended to be a place where a group of people work together for transformation.”
At the Solstices and Equinoxes Neskaya reaches out to the local community by offering free family celebrations of song, story and dance to celebrate the turning of the seasons.
Neskaya aims to add to the store of happiness and compassion in the world and to further this it has hosted, among other things, live music, storytelling, Dances of Universal Peace, Yoga, Astrology, Tai Chi ad Chi Gung, Klezmer dancing, shamanic journeying, and the study of compassionate communication. One very special occasional event is “Dancing the Sacred Year”, when we trace the cycle of the eight Celtic festivals in 24 hours, starting at noon on the first day with Midsummer dances, progressing through Lammas at 3 p.m., Autumn Equinox at
6 p.m. and Samhain at 9 p.m., then waking up at 12 to dance the winter solstice in the depths of the night. At 3 a.m. we dance Imbolc, at 6 a.m. the Spring Equinox, and we end at 9 a.m. with maypole dancing in the glorious burst of energy that is Beltane!
Back at the all-day dance, the dancers stand and look through the west windows over the hills where Jenny, an astronomer by training, maps the gradual annual progression of the setting sun back and forth along the horizon. Three black bears, mother and two large cubs, pad across the driveway, heading for the compost heap. Moose and deer are frequent visitors, too, while in spring, the air is full of bird and frog song.
The dancers join hands once more around the glowing centerpiece and stand in companionable silence, waiting for the ideas to bubble up. “What’s that one where we throw water at each other?” someone asks. The music is quickly found, the steps reviewed and they move together into the “The Source”, gathering healing waters to spread from Neskaya out into the world.
Find the list of upcoming events at Neskaya on the web page www.neskaya.com
Or email Neskaya@earthlink.com
Or call 802-603-5828 (in the USA)
I began dancing with adults with developmental disabilities during a transformative year as a volunteer co-worker in a Camphill Village, a community with adults with developmental disabilities, in New York State. The Camphill organization is based on the education philosophy of Rudolf Steiner who also gave us biodynamic agriculture and Waldorf (Steiner) education. Camphill aims to help people with mental and physical challenges realize their potential in life, while working to protect and conserve the land. 
