Posted on by WomenandMyth

Announcing Scholar Salon 33: Register for November 11

“The Old European Roots of Women’s Circle Dance”

with Laura Shannon

Thursday,  November 11, 2021 at 12 NOON Eastern Standard Time 

REGISTER HERE

 

Laura Shannon in Women’s Dance Circle photo by B. Frey

In traditional contexts, women’s circle dances provide an embodied experience of community-oriented values including solidarity, shared leadership, mutual support, and a culture of peace. Archaeomythologist Marija Gimbutas associated these values with the egalitarian Neolithic civilisations she explored, and these are precisely the values which humanity needs to activate to ensure a viable future for our planet.

Women’s ritual dances of the Balkans belong to an oral tradition which has been handed down through female generations through thousands of years, as Elizabeth Wayland Barber has shown. Laura Shannon has spent over thirty years learning these dances from grandmothers in villages in Greece and the Balkans, with a focus on the symbolic ‘language’ of dance and textile patterns reflecting the image of the Old European Goddess.

Razgrad apron hem with 5 women dancers

This illustrated talk suggests that the open circle of the ritual dance may represent a symbolic womb through which dancers experience a metaphorical journey of life, death, and rebirth, particularly through spiral dances associated with springtime. The sacred centre of the circle may be understood as a symbolic omphalós or navel, with the danced path as an umbilicus connecting dancers to the life-giving Mother Earth. Bread ovens in these cultures are often also shaped like an omphalós: the community is nourished with vitality both through the women’s dance, and by the bread the women bake.

Traditional women’s ritual circle dances have relevance not only as living descendants of Old European Goddess cultures, but because of the insights and wisdom they offer participants today.

Laura Shannon
Laura Shannon has been researching, teaching, and writing about traditional women’s dances for over thirty years, and is considered a ‘grandmother’ of the worldwide Sacred/Circle Dance movement. She holds degrees in Dance Movement Therapy, Intercultural Studies, and Myth, Cosmology and the Sacred, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Gloucester in England. Laura is also a faculty member of the Findhorn Foundation Sacred Dance Department, Founding Director of the Athena Institute for Women’s Dance and Culture, and an honorary lifetime member of the Sacred Dance Guild. She has been given the task of preserving Carol P. Christ’s literary legacy, and as the new director of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual, will follow in Carol’s footsteps to lead Goddess tours on Crete.
 

Save the dates for upcoming ASWM Salons:

January 13 2022 at NOON Eastern Standard Time
“Dreaming the Presence: Exploring the Sacred Feminine in Dreams”
Rabbi Jill Hammer

January 27 2022 at 3 pm Eastern Standard Time
“Onsite research: Listening to the Land“
Elizabeth Cunningham

February 10 2022  TIME TO BE DETERMINED 
“Recent Thinking on the Maternal Gift Economy“
Genevieve Vaughan

Benefit of Membership - ASWM

The Salon recording will also be available to members after the event.