‘Do you have the discipline to be a free spirit?’
GABRIELLE ROTH
It was July 1988. I was driving with a friend to work with Arwyn again, this time in the north of England, at a conference centre in Leeds. Duncan was a fellow apprentice in the Deer Tribe. He was also a social worker at the time and earning a reasonable salary. Hence he had a car and he had invited me along for the ride.
We were driving up the motorway talking about our most recent ceremonies when Duncan remembered that he’d brought along something for me to take a look at. He asked me to reach for a black- and-white brochure that was in the back of the car.
I picked it up and gave it a quick read. It was for an organization called the Open Gate. There was some blurb on the front about what the Open Gate was and then some information on a bunch of workshops. Nothing looked particularly special to me, but Duncan said, ‘Open it up. It’s on the inside pages.’
Some moments in life stand out like freeze-frames. This was one of those. I like to call them ‘pearl moments’ – shiny happenings that are seared into the memory. Whenever we call them to mind, the feelings remain fresh, the colours bright and the most arbitrary of details clear. Opening that brochure was one of those moments for me.
I remember a Toni Childs song was playing. It was a fine, clear day and the traffic was light. I was happy to be on the way to my next Arwyn ‘fix’. I turned the page and saw the words ‘Open Gate Training with Gabrielle Roth’. There was a picture of a rather beautiful woman with a leather jacket slung over her right shoulder, shining black hair and eyes that both fascinated and scared me. Who was she?
I read the short paragraphs describing the training. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. If I’d sat down to devise the perfect course of study for myself, I couldn’t have come up with anything half as good as what I was reading. Creativity, shamanism, ecstasy, trance – I was hooked. And then I looked at the price.
Like a balloon that is blown up and instantly popped, I moved from super-excitement to total deflation. I was certain it was well out of my reach. But next to the blurb for the teacher training course there was a short piece about an introductory weekend happening a few weeks later in London.
Later that day I called the Open Gate from a phone box in Leeds and booked the weekend.
When I arrived back in London a week later, I told Susannah about it. She looked at me quizzically and then laughed.
‘I just booked the same course.’
The weeks went by and autumn closed in. I cooked, cleaned the stairs, went to my t’ai ch’i class, did my dreaming practices and bagged bags of sticky dried fruit at the wholefood store I was working at, went to my therapy … and day by day, my excitement grew.
The week before the course began, I was still short of money to pay for it. As much as I wanted to be there, I was on the verge of cancelling it. I prayed for help and guidance. Within 20 minutes, I had phone calls from three new clients wanting ritual photography sessions that week. I was elated.
I don’t know what I expected from something called the 5Rhythms. I certainly wasn’t thinking about dance, but when I walked into the Karate Dojo at the top of the East West Centre on Old Street at 6.45 on that Friday night and saw a room of people in leotards stretching, I was sure I’d come to the wrong place.
‘Is this the Gabrielle Roth workshop?’
‘Yes it is.’
‘Oh!’
I hid away as best I could in a corner, wondering what on earth I’d signed up for. I didn’t dance unless I was drunk or in an occasional ritual in a dark cave! How had I got myself in this mess?
Music was playing and the 20 participants were stretching and moving around as if they knew what they were doing. I didn’t. I felt acutely self-conscious. And then that same Toni Childs song that Duncan had played on that journey to Leeds came over the speakers. As the words rang out, a woman entered the room in a full-length black leather jacket. She had long black hair and was wearing dark sunglasses. She waltzed through the space. As Toni Childs sang about power in her song Hush!, Gabrielle danced past me, lifted her glasses, looked right into my eyes and sang the words ‘the power’ right at me.
I didn’t know where to put myself. I just had the feeling that there was nowhere to hide.
The rest of the warm-up was equally excruciating. I just hadn’t realized that I was coming on a dance weekend and my mind was frantically thinking of ways to make my excuses and leave.
But then Gabrielle sat us down to introduce the workshop. She was funny – very funny. She seemed to recognize the turmoil I was in as she talked about how far from our bodies most of us were and how disempowering a state that was to be in. She talked about self-consciousness and how it was a step along the road from unconsciousness, and she promised us that self-consciousness would soon be replaced by consciousness.
I liked her immediately. She was sharp and sassy and those eyes shone mischievously and hinted at mysteries to come. She had ‘New York’ written large in her style and yet there was something ancient and compelling in the way she spoke and moved. Her words weren’t static – they danced. I was hypnotized.
When she asked us to get up and started to guide us into movement, I was astonished by what happened. The music was percussive and her seduction was simple: ‘Just focus your attention on different parts of your body and let them move. Don’t make them move. Simply be fascinated by how they respond to the rhythm.’
Every now and then my mind tried to reassert control, but it was useless. I didn’t feel as though I was dancing. I wasn’t concerned with how my body looked. Nor was I drunk. I felt free, strong, totally fascinated, and within a few minutes, I realized I’d found my teacher.
I’d been studying with the Deer Tribe for two years and I loved my teachers, but this was something else. It’s difficult to explain, but some part of me just loved Gabrielle right from the beginning. The feeling of coming home was overwhelming. And the feeling of energy and creativity that was unleashed in those next hours and days was immense. I rediscovered poetry. I rediscovered the creativity of my own body. I discovered for the first time that whatever I thought about it, my body loved to move, loved to dance, and that the deeper I danced, the more into trance I went. I could be in my body and in trance at the same time. In trance, the mind is quiet and still. My body spun and moved, seemingly with a will of its own, and my emotions just passed through me like the weather – one moment an autumn storm, the next a still summer’s day. My eyes cried tears I didn’t know were there. I raged and I didn’t know why. It was if my whole psyche recognized an open window, took a deep breath, leaped out and flew.
By the end of the weekend, the impossible mountain that had been the fee for Gabrielle’s training course had become an insignificant molehill. I knew without doubt that I had to be there and I knew without doubt that I would find a way.
Susannah was having a similar experience. When we’d got together in the late summer of 1986, we’d had the feeling that we had something to do together. There was a purpose to our relationship. At the time, I was known as Mikk and she as Opi, so we formed the MikkOpi Project. We weren’t sure how, but it was clear right from the beginning that our project was to find or create a body of work that was focused on personal creativity, healing and creative approaches to conflict between people and nations. Our purpose was to create a deeper sense of balance and relationship between people and the Earth that sustains us all. We both felt that Gabrielle’s work was a significant step along the way, and more than that, we both had a feeling of wanting to offer ourselves fully to her and her work. Although she used to joke about not wanting to be a guru (‘Why sit on a pink cushion all day answering stupid questions?’), the devotion we both felt for her was intense. We were desperate to get a place on her teacher training and to start putting her work out into the world as soon as possible.
That first weekend, when a few of us went out for a meal in a restaurant in Hampstead, I felt awkward around her. She was dynamic, gritty and unpredictable. She seemed to have a radar for the part of me that wanted to be noticed and she ignored me entirely when I was feeling in need of her attention. Yet as soon as I settled down and relaxed, she was right there.
She also had an unearthly talent for making me and everyone around her feel special. When Susannah and I told her we both wanted to do her training, she just smiled and said, ‘We’ll see.’ But she winked at us both at the same time.
We also told her, with the impetuousness of the young, that we were there to serve her and her work for as long as she’d have us. I was 24 years old.
I went home from the workshop changed. When I got back to the community, the phone rang. It was an old friend I hadn’t seen or spoken to for a couple of years. We chatted and caught up with each other’s lives. And then he asked me if I knew anyone who needed support with a project.
I asked him to tell me more.
He said that every two years, he gave a sum of money to someone who was starting out on a creative project and he asked if I knew anyone who needed that kind of support.
My heart leaped. I asked him how much he had to give. ‘Four hundred pounds,’ he replied.
That was the exact amount required for the first payment for the training. I told him about it and without hesitation he told me the money was mine!
I thanked him, we said our goodbyes and then I put the phone down and ran up the stairs shouting for joy. I couldn’t believe it. The doors were opening and I was on my way. I rang the Open Gate there and then and asked them for an application form.
Susannah and I were told that we would receive our answers from the Open Gate in a few weeks’ time. In the meantime, my life continued. I danced every day and did my best not to think too much about my application.
On the day the letter was supposed to arrive, Susannah and I were house-sitting for a friend in Devon. It was a cold, damp day, almost gloomy. We were both agitated and doing our best not to let it show. We’d asked Lynn, a woman from the community, to call us when the post arrived. We were sitting at the kitchen table when the phone rang.
‘There’s a letter for you with “Open Gate” written on the front. Is that the one you’re waiting for?’
‘Yes.’
‘Yes, please.’
There was a pause and I could hear the sounds of an envelope being opened mixed with the roar of my heartbeat in my ears. What if it said no? What if one of us got a place and the other was refused?
‘Okay, let me see… Shall I read it to you?’
‘Yes. Please read it.’
Lynn started to read: ‘Dear Mikk and Susannah, I am glad to tell you that your applications for Gabrielle Roth’s Teacher Training have been accepted.’
We both jumped up and danced round the kitchen.
‘Are you alright?’
I heard Lynn’s voice from the phone, which I had dropped in my excitement.
‘Yes, absolutely bloody brilliant!’
‘Should I read on?’
‘That’s alright, Lynn. We’ll wait till we’re home. Thanks so much for calling.’
‘I’m happy for you both. Congratulations.’
I put the phone down and collapsed into my chair. I hadn’t been aware how tense I’d been. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. So I did both. We both did.
The training was due to begin the following January and the next few months were a whirlwind. Our MikkOpi Project evolved into the 5 to Midnight Gaia Dance Project and we found our very first organizer to help us set up the five teaching assignments we were supposed to do between modules one and two of Gabrielle’s training. She was a marvellous woman called Bee Quick. True to her name, she’d soon set up our first ecstatic dance workshops in London, Glastonbury, Dorset, Cambridge and Bristol. We were so ready to begin making our offering, even though we’d hardly even tasted the work we were about to train in!
When around 20 of us arrived at Gabrielle’s training, we were supercharged and ready to rock. We danced and danced and danced in a small room at the delightfully named Grimstone Manor, Horrabridge!
Gabrielle did her utmost to pass on the spirit of her work to us. She was determined to teach us how to get people back into their bodies, out of their heads and into the extraordinary, creative and unique beings she believed everyone to be. She told us that she didn’t mind how we taught. If that was sitting in a pub listening to people, creating theatre or teaching movement, she didn’t care, as long as each of us was true to our own spirit and to the spirit of the work.
Over the 10 days we were there, she became more and more exasperated with us. It was clear we were beginners and had a huge amount to learn. She led us in a theatre exercise called the Meisner technique. In it, we had to sit in pairs in front of the group and name things we saw and felt in our partner. By the second afternoon, Gabrielle was so infuriated by how safe we were keeping our exchanges that she brought a pump-action water pistol into the room. As soon as she felt we weren’t risking enough, one or both of us ended up with a soaking. It was a mixture of hilarious, humiliating and terrifying. It took us three days to get what it was she wanted from us, and by that time people had started to arrive at sessions in swimming costumes, wearing waterproofs or with umbrellas.
Gabrielle would use just about anything to get us to learn and in those 10 days I started to discover and to recognize the power of her work. It was revolutionary. It brought the body back into Western spiritual practice.
Gabrielle was a shaman of her culture and of her time. She saw the ways in which the dominant story of the time was throttling our true individuality and destroying our sense of community. She saw the devastating loneliness of spirit that we suffer from and she saw where our disembodied and totally rational and results-led mindset was taking us. And, just as a shaman must, she had travelled the roads of her own suffering and found that the dance was big enough to carry it all.
She implored us to throw our hearts and bodies into the rhythm and lose ourselves in the beat. She played wild and tender music and she gave everything she had to seducing us back into our own direct connection with the guiding force of life. She was a genius with a big heart and all the other complexities that often go with that territory. And, as dedicated to her as I was before I arrived, by the time we left that incredible initiation, I was totally devoted to the mission of both living her message and getting it out into the world. I was totally fired up. I had found my purpose and, strange as it was to someone who only a few months before had no wish to dance at all, I was now a movement teacher in training with a message to deliver and a practice to carry it.
As we left Grimstone, I was distraught saying goodbye to my teacher and to my new companions. I felt my heart breaking as we drove along the driveway. Even though I knew we would meet again in a few months, it was like leaving a womb. I knew that the harsh world of London wasn’t exactly waiting for me to return. I knew we’d have to work like maniacs to get this work out there. And most of all, I knew that I had a huge challenge to deal with.
On the dance floor, I’d found a freedom and a power I’d never known I had. Every time I stepped onto the floor, I had no idea where it would take me. I didn’t care. I was willing to go anywhere to find the healing, the expression and the freedom that those ecstatic states promised. And yet off the dance floor, even within the relative safety of Grimstone Manor, I still felt tongue-tied and awkward whenever Gabrielle approached. I still wanted her approval. I wanted her to see me as someone special. I wanted her to see the shaman in me.
Gabrielle showed me the difference between hiding my gifts by trying to get them noticed and what she used to call ‘disappearing in the dance’. I saw and healed so much in that training and I could see the challenge that faced me. How on earth was I going to bring the freedom I’d found on the dance floor onto the dance floor of everyday life?
As we left, the tears started to flow. I felt naked. The world seemed such a huge place and I felt so insignificant. I was carrying something precious. I had found something sacred. It was a blend of my own medicine and the medicine that Gabrielle was entrusting us to carry into the world. Was I worthy of such a task? Would I manage it?
Although Susannah and I had each other, we were both overwhelmed by the task that was in front of us. We knew there was no ready-made group of people just pining for us to get going and offer our new inspiration. Gabrielle, like Anna Halprin and Martha Graham before her, was a pioneer. And we were part of her first cohort of teachers in Europe.
The cold grey January streets of London did little to lift my mood. I could only see the loneliness and the disconnection that Gabrielle had so eloquently pointed out to us. I felt so small in that vast city, but somewhere deep inside I’d rediscovered the determination of the warrior.
It was January 1989 and our first workshop was in two weeks’ time.
We had work to do.