Memories of Gabrielle Roth

I'm buried under snow at the moment. Here's something from my memory project:

"Bibi introduced me to Gabrielle Roth’s 5 rhythms. Roth is a Californian (I think. If she’s not, she ought to be) who claims to have 'discovered' there are but five fundamental rhythms at work in all dance forms. I only remember two of them: bubbles and staccato. An evening doing the 5 rhythms involves dancing in an uninhibited, drug-free fashion to many different kinds of music with a group of others, releasing the inner beast of bodily creativity. Or something.

We went along to a drafty church hall in Kentish Town in the late 1990’s, paying ten quid to get in. The hall was filled with people, many exhibiting somewhat unusual behaviour. A bearded man in a thick woolly jumper was grunting and stroking the wall. A dreadlocked woman in leg-ins was cavorting erotically with the floor.

Suspending a sense of the ridiculous, I eased myself into the spirit of the occasion. It was quite liberating to focus entirely on the visceral kinesthetics of bodily-being-in-movement. The MC at one point asked us to pick a partner, and ‘stare at your partner as if they are the most important thing in your world.’ Adventurous as I was, this was a little too much Californ-eye-ay for me. However, the woman in the leg-ins had clamped her eyes on me and had drawn herself close, and was gazing with laser-like intent into my eyes, while wafting her arms around like a windmill. I could do little else but join in.

The second time I went, some odd serotonin/endorphin/natural chemical event happened in my brain on the way home. I found myself singing and dancing on the tube like a mad man. I had become the hirsute man, stroking the wall, at least in my head. There may not be 5 rhythms in the world, but there is something to be said for a few hours of uninhibited dancing."