Laura Shannon
Laura Shannon trained in Intercultural Studies (1986) and Dance Movement Therapy (1990), and holds a Master's degree in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred at Canterbury Christ Church University in England (2020), for which her M.A. dissertation on the esoteric wisdom of women's ritual dances was awarded a Distinction. She is currently a PhD candidate in Ecocultural Humanities at the University of Gloucester.
Laura trained in Sacred Dance at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland in 1987 and 1988 and has studied with many master teachers. Considered one of the 'grandmothers' of the worldwide Sacred Circle Dance movement, she has been researching and teaching traditional women's dances from Greece, Armenia and the Balkans for over 35 years. Her writings on dance have appeared in numerous books and periodicals; she edited the book 'String of Pearls: Forty Years of Sacred Dance in the Findhorn Community' in 2016; and writes a regular blog on feminismandreligion.com. Laura has been on the faculty of the Sacred Dance Department at the Findhorn ecological community since 1998, is Founding Director of the non-profit Athena Institute for Women’s Dance and Culture, and in 2018 was made an Honorary Lifetime Member of the Sacred Dance Guild in recognition of her 'significant and lasting contribution to dance as a sacred art'. In 2021, she was named Director of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual, with the task of preserving Carol P. Christ's literary legacy and continuing Carol's Goddess Pilgrimage on Crete, and in 2022 was invited to join the Advisory Board of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology.
Laura Shannon's research into women’s ritual dances of Greece, the Balkans and the Near East takes three main threads: first, three decades of original field research, travelling to rural areas in Eastern Europe to learn dances, songs and rituals directly from village grandmothers; second, tracing the ancient roots of these dances, songs, rituals and textiles back to Neolithic Old Europe and the egalitarian matriarchal civilizations explored by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas; third, understanding the healing and transformative power these dances still have today, for people of any place or culture, through her background in dance /movement therapy and lifelong experience teaching these dances in seminars all over the world. See also www.laurashannon.net
Supervisors: Arran Stibbe, University of Gloucester
Laura trained in Sacred Dance at the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland in 1987 and 1988 and has studied with many master teachers. Considered one of the 'grandmothers' of the worldwide Sacred Circle Dance movement, she has been researching and teaching traditional women's dances from Greece, Armenia and the Balkans for over 35 years. Her writings on dance have appeared in numerous books and periodicals; she edited the book 'String of Pearls: Forty Years of Sacred Dance in the Findhorn Community' in 2016; and writes a regular blog on feminismandreligion.com. Laura has been on the faculty of the Sacred Dance Department at the Findhorn ecological community since 1998, is Founding Director of the non-profit Athena Institute for Women’s Dance and Culture, and in 2018 was made an Honorary Lifetime Member of the Sacred Dance Guild in recognition of her 'significant and lasting contribution to dance as a sacred art'. In 2021, she was named Director of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual, with the task of preserving Carol P. Christ's literary legacy and continuing Carol's Goddess Pilgrimage on Crete, and in 2022 was invited to join the Advisory Board of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology.
Laura Shannon's research into women’s ritual dances of Greece, the Balkans and the Near East takes three main threads: first, three decades of original field research, travelling to rural areas in Eastern Europe to learn dances, songs and rituals directly from village grandmothers; second, tracing the ancient roots of these dances, songs, rituals and textiles back to Neolithic Old Europe and the egalitarian matriarchal civilizations explored by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas; third, understanding the healing and transformative power these dances still have today, for people of any place or culture, through her background in dance /movement therapy and lifelong experience teaching these dances in seminars all over the world. See also www.laurashannon.net
Supervisors: Arran Stibbe, University of Gloucester
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Bernhard’s exegesis of symbolic meaning in traditional dances intrigued me deeply. Wanting to explore this further, I danced with many folk dance teachers, including Erik Bendix, Yves Moreau and Steve Kotansky, and came to see traditional dances as moving mantras full of hidden wisdom. Having completed a degree in Intercultural Studies, I then trained as a Dance Movement Therapist, in order to better understand the therapeutic qualities I could sense were inherent in traditional dances.
Around that time I began to travel to Eastern Europe and beyond in pursuit of living dance traditions, particularly women’s ritual dances, and I was fortunate to witness dance customs with roots going back thousands of years. I came to understand the dances as a body-based wisdom practice, similar to yoga, t’ai chi, and qi gong, which help energy to flow in the body in a beneficent way.
... to this Festschrift celebrating 40 years of Sacred Dance in the Findhorn community! Since Bernhard Wosien first brought it here in 1976, through the dedication of community dancers, musicians, and teachers, this movement practice has travelled all over the world. In Findhorn it still serves as a spiritual practice and a tool linking dance groups everywhere in light and love.
Many of us feel immense gratitude for Sacred Dance, for the ways it has transformed our lives, and for Findhorn’s special role as the place where it was lovingly nurtured. As this anniversary approached, I received guidance to invite dancers everywhere to share our stories of Sacred Dance and to gather them in this celebratory volume.
Articles by Laura Shannon
Ich bin überzeugt, dass dieses Dreitakt-Tanzmuster die verkörperte Umsetzung des uralten Symbols vom Lebensbaum ist. Das Volkskunstmuster des Lebensbaums, gewebt, geschnitzt, gebacken oder gestickt, ist genauso weit verbreitet und allgegenwärtig wie die Tänze in demselben geografischen Gebiet des alten Europa und des Nahen Ostens, in dem wir die Dreitakt-Tänze antreffen. Und der Lebensbaum selbst ist ein kodiertes Symbol der Muttergöttin, die einst in genau diesem geografischen Gebiet des Alt-Europas verehrt wurde.
Bernhard’s exegesis of symbolic meaning in traditional dances intrigued me deeply. Wanting to explore this further, I danced with many folk dance teachers, including Erik Bendix, Yves Moreau and Steve Kotansky, and came to see traditional dances as moving mantras full of hidden wisdom. Having completed a degree in Intercultural Studies, I then trained as a Dance Movement Therapist, in order to better understand the therapeutic qualities I could sense were inherent in traditional dances.
Around that time I began to travel to Eastern Europe and beyond in pursuit of living dance traditions, particularly women’s ritual dances, and I was fortunate to witness dance customs with roots going back thousands of years. I came to understand the dances as a body-based wisdom practice, similar to yoga, t’ai chi, and qi gong, which help energy to flow in the body in a beneficent way.
... to this Festschrift celebrating 40 years of Sacred Dance in the Findhorn community! Since Bernhard Wosien first brought it here in 1976, through the dedication of community dancers, musicians, and teachers, this movement practice has travelled all over the world. In Findhorn it still serves as a spiritual practice and a tool linking dance groups everywhere in light and love.
Many of us feel immense gratitude for Sacred Dance, for the ways it has transformed our lives, and for Findhorn’s special role as the place where it was lovingly nurtured. As this anniversary approached, I received guidance to invite dancers everywhere to share our stories of Sacred Dance and to gather them in this celebratory volume.
Ich bin überzeugt, dass dieses Dreitakt-Tanzmuster die verkörperte Umsetzung des uralten Symbols vom Lebensbaum ist. Das Volkskunstmuster des Lebensbaums, gewebt, geschnitzt, gebacken oder gestickt, ist genauso weit verbreitet und allgegenwärtig wie die Tänze in demselben geografischen Gebiet des alten Europa und des Nahen Ostens, in dem wir die Dreitakt-Tänze antreffen. Und der Lebensbaum selbst ist ein kodiertes Symbol der Muttergöttin, die einst in genau diesem geografischen Gebiet des Alt-Europas verehrt wurde.
Women’s traditional circle dances of the Balkans and Near East have been danced for thousands of years, and are still danced today at weddings and village celebrations. I compare common motifs in four forms of women’s artistic expression: archaeological finds, embroidered textiles, dance patterns, and song words. These modes of unwritten communication transmit ‘hidden information’ which, in the words of Marguerite Rigoglioso, ‘may have been deposited for safekeeping in those great repositories of the forbidden – myth and folklore – where they have remained veiled in plain sight for two millenia.’ (Rigoglioso 2009, p50. This article shares some observations about women’s dance traditions in remote villages on the slopes of Mount Olympus in Greece, and the ancient wisdom encoded within them, which I believe has its roots in the Goddess culture of Neolithic times.
All over Greece, the Balkans, Russia and Ukraine, Central Asia, India, and in Scandinavian and Celtic lore, myths and legends tell of nymphs, nereids, naiads, and Muses. Also known as vily or ‘willies’, as Elizabeth Wayland Barber (2013) describes, these priestess / Goddess figures are divine or semi-divine female beings associated with water, clouds and rain; birds, flight and journeys between worlds; trees, vegetation and healing herbs; prophecy and divination; fertility and blessing, and music and dance. In Greece they were worshipped as early as the 8th C BCE, though the female figure associated with water, rain, and fertility has roots in the early Neolithic era (Gimbutas 1991). Remnants of these beliefs and practices live on in the ritual dances of the womenof Greece and the Balkans.
definiert diesen besonderen Zustand mit dem Terminus Kohärenz:
'eine geordnete und harmonische Verbundenheit zwischen Teilen eines Systems oder zwischen Menschen.... Unter den vielen Vorteilen persönlicher Kohärenz finden sich verbesserte Fassung, mehr Energie, klares Denken, verbesserte Immunfunktion und hor- monelles Gleichgewicht.'
Wenn wir Maschinen zur Hand hätten, könnten wir diese rhythmische Übereinstim- mung elektromagnetischer Wellen in unserem Hirn, Atem und Herzen wis- senschaftlich messen, aber wir sehen uns nur an und lächeln. Die kollektive Er- fahrung der Synchronizität gemeinsamer Bewegung hilft genauso den Tänzerinnen und Tänzern bei der Kräftigung des individuellen Selbstvertrauens, von Autonomie und Souveränität, und stärkt Kohärenz in der sozialen Gruppe und im individuellen Körper. Alle tanzen in einem schönen Gleichgewicht von leichter Stärke und unbe- fangener Anmut.
If we had machines handy, we could scientifically measure this rhythmic alignment of electromagnetic waves in our brains, breath, and hearts, but we just look at each other and smile. The collective experience of shared movement synchrony also helps each dancer strengthen her or his individual confidence, autonomy and sovereignty, building coherence in both the social group and in individual bodies. Everyone dances with a beautiful balance of easy strength and unselfconscious grace.
Das Wissen um das Tanzen ohne Worte ist hilfreich– und nicht nur um an fremd- sprachigen Tanzseminaren teilnehmen zu können! Oft haben wir in unserer inneren Entwicklung keine Worte für unseren Prozess, oder die Worte reichen nicht aus, um etwas zu klären oder durchzusprechen. Dann tun wir, was die Großmütter auf den Dörfern tun: was auch immer es ist, wir bringen es in den Kreis, das Gefäss, den Kessel des Tanzes. Ob wir es in Worte fassen können oder nicht, in diesem heiligen Raum wird gehalten, was in unserem Leben geschieht, und wird durch den simplen Akt des gemeinschaftlichen Tanzens geheilt.
Diese Technik ist das Fundament meines zweijährigen Trainings, in dem Fähigkeiten zur Arbeit mit den inhärent therapeutischen Qualitäten der Frauenritualtänze vermittelt werden: was auch immer dich belastet, bring es zum Tanz, wo es transformiert werden kann. Vielleicht nicht geheilt, als wäre es nie geschehen, aber doch trans- formiert in dem Sinn, dass die Freude, Integrität und Ganzheit des gemeinschaftlichen Tanzens die Last zu erleichtern helfen, so dass wir unser Leben weiterführen können.
This is the fundamental technique of my 2-year trainings, which teach skills of working with the inherently therapeutic qualities of women's ritual dances: whatever trouble you have, bring it to the dance, and it can be transformed. Perhaps not healed as if nothing ever happened, but transformed in the sense that the joy, integrity, and wholeness of communal dance can help lighten the burden so we can go on with our lives.'
The living tradition of Greek dance attracts and inspires foreigners from all over the world. This paper looks specifically at ways in which women's dances of Greece can have meaning for non-Greek women of different nationalities and religious beliefs. I have been researching and teaching Greek, Balkan and Armenian circle dances all over the world, in combination with my work as a dance movement therapist, for thirty-five years. For women in my seminars, the dances are not merely an enjoyable form of exercise and an opportunity to broaden their awareness of different cultures (although these are worthy goals, which Greek dance can fulfil in almost any context). In the women's circles I observe, the dances also offer personal insight, healing, and therapeutic transformation for the individuals who dance them. Thus Greek dance today can serve as a contemporary non-denominational prayer practice, by facilitating a personal connection with the larger transpersonal forces we can call cosmic or divine. This has been a key purpose of Greek choral dance since ancient times.
Circle dance in southeastern Europe most likely developed and spread along with agriculture in the early Neolithic era, and many circle dances surviving today have retained their original association with seasonal rituals and cycles of life. Often the dances embody an age-old worldview based on values of sustainability, community, and reverence for the earth. Because women are the most likely inventors of agriculture, as well as those most likely to do small-scale agricultural work, women's dances in particular express the original link between the fertility of nature and the fertility of the female. For contemporary women approaching Greek dance from other cultures, this life-giving power can be experienced in a metaphorical way: it is not necessary to work the fields or bear actual children in order to connect to the creative life force which is awakened in dancers by the dance. Circle dance supports women to develop their creativity, agency, and nurturing, and to express these qualities in their lives in other ways. Because the dances pre-date organised religion as we know it, women of any and all religious beliefs can feel at home, and find meaning in, the circle of the dance.
This paper draws on research and fieldwork which informed my Master's degree in Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred, in the School of Childhood and Education Sciences at Canterbury Christ Church University in Canterbury, England.
Kostantis Kourmadias is a master of traditional saz, violin and singing styles, specializing in the oldest forms of Greek traditional music, particularly island music and the Greek music of Asia Minor, where his grandparents were born. He studied Byzantine music at the Simon Karas Institute in Athens, and for thirty years has taught traditional Greek music at the Ilion and Pallini Music High Schools in Athens, helping pioneer the rebirth of the saz (tambourás) in Greek music. Kostantis plays in concerts, dance seminars, and festivals, and offers seminars in Greek traditional music, throughout Greece, Europe, the UK and the USA.
Before the emergence of modern science, information was encoded and transmitted through largely nonverbal means, in the realm of right-brain consciousness which precedes, surrounds, and runs parallel to the left-brain thinking dominant in academic institutions and the scientific worldview.
Oral cultures have developed complex ways of preserving and passing on information without the technology of writing. Non-literate and semiliterate peoples are no less intelligent, and often have better memories, than those immersed in print culture. The right-brain learning process is cyclical, artistic, and intuitive, using symbol, metaphor, myth and other forms of condensed wisdom, in what Walter Ong calls the ‘holistic immersion of orality’. The reduction of information to its essence transmits nonrational and nonlinear information while allowing scope for imagination, intuition and individual interpretation.
For thirty years I have been researching artistic traditions which make use of just such a learning process. Eastern European village women, often semiliterate and excluded from the possibility of entering the academy, continue to transmit information through a sophisticated system of interrelated traditions including myths and legends, songs and dances, and textile patterns. These interwoven artistic media enable both education and expression, and activate both the right and left sides of the brain. They are beautiful, joyful and meaningful; they enchant. Together they form a system of preserving and passing on information which has existed outside of, and parallel to, the academy, for many centuries.
I chose to immerse myself in this culture after earning degrees in Intercultural Studies and Dance Movement Therapy. This paper will briefly describe the methodology developed in the course of my lifelong research and teaching, and will more closely examine one key motif, the woman with wings. The winged woman appears in myth, song, textiles, archaeological artefacts, and dance, frequently in association with life transitions such as puberty and marriage. Marguerite Rigoglioso suggests that legends of winged women reference priestesses of pre-Christian times and their shamanistic ability to fly between the worlds; I contend that Balkan women of today, arguably the living descendants of the priestesses of antiquity, use folk arts to intentionally preserve key elements of an ancient culture.
My proposal therefore is that we consider how we may draw inspiration from this parallel, non-academic education system, and invite into our learning process those things which have been missing from the academy: nature and the body; intuition and poetry; creativity, celebration and play; and a sense of meaning in the part we play preserving knowledge and wisdom for future generations. As we seek to strengthen both wings of the mind, and to think with both hemispheres of the brain, we too can learn to fly between the worlds, out of the ivory tower and over the garden wall.
This text comes from an illustrated talk introducing a meditative musical experience with Laura Shannon, Kostantis Kourmadias & Nikolas Angelopoulos, in Bad Herrenalb, Germany 29 November 2024.
The Magi (singular 'magus', 'mage') are also known as the 'three wise men' or the 'three kings' who came from the East when Jesus was born. The number of Magi was not recorded: the Western church assumes three gift-givers, perhaps because of the three gifts, but in Aramaic and Syriac Christianity, the Magi were twelve. The gifts they brought – gold, frankincense and myrrh – were extremely precious, materially and spiritually, and can guide us to better understand the significance of this celebration.
In those early days, Sacred Dance drew its repertoire from a blend of traditional folk dance and modern choreographed dances, in a context of Western esoteric knowledge including Christian mysticism and classical Greek mythology. My own background included degrees in Intercultural Studies and Dance Movement Therapy, and strong interests in Middle Eastern dance, indigenous wisdom traditions, and women's spirituality circles. Because of these influences, I was particularly drawn to traditional dances and the way I felt they mediated a direct experience of the divine in the earth, the body, and the feminine – a worldview which predates Judaeo-Christian, masculine hero- and saviour-based interpretations of myth and symbol.