Day Zero — Arrival
The bus from Lisbon airport is, as always, the first practice of the retreat, even though no one calls it that. Twenty-two participants, give or take, arrive at the venue in waves, jet-lagged, suspicious, secretly thrilled. We do not greet them with a clipboard. We greet them with cold water with cucumber, a fire in the stone fireplace even in summer because the fire is doing emotional work the radiators cannot, and a single instruction whispered at the door: take off your shoes.
Just that.
Take off your shoes, and put them on the wooden rack by the entrance, and walk into the room. The floor will know you are here. You don't have to do anything else yet.
I stand in the corner with my co-facilitator Mirembe — who trained with me in Tel Aviv and is, without exaggeration, the most attuned reader of a collective body I have ever met — and we watch the room fill up. We don't talk. We just watch. We watch the shoulders. We watch the breath. We watch the man from the New York private equity firm walk in like he is entering a board meeting, and we watch his shoulders descend a full inch when his bare feet meet the wood. We watch the woman from the biotech company arrive with her arms crossed and we watch her uncross them within ninety seconds, not because anyone asked her to, but because the room is doing what the room does.
This is the first thing I love about this work, and the first thing I want to tell you about: the room does the work. Our job, as facilitators, is mostly to not get in its way.
Dinner is long. We don't run any practices the first night. We let people eat. We let them find each other. We let the second glass of wine happen, because the second glass of wine is when the executive who has been preparing his elevator pitch about himself for the entire flight finally gives it up and tells the woman next to him that his dog died last month and he has not cried about it yet. This conversation will matter on Day Three. We don't know it yet, but the floor does.
Before bed we offer a single ten-minute practice — Chapter 1 of the canon, the Primordial Movement. No music. No mirrors. Eyes closed. Just the body remembering it is a body. Twenty-two people, swaying slightly in a room lit by candles, in a converted dance hall on a cliff above an ocean. By the time I ring the bowl to close the practice, three people are crying quietly. Nobody asks them why. Nobody needs to.
I sleep that night the way I always sleep on Day Zero of a retreat — like a child who has just been picked up from school.
Tomorrow we begin.
Day One — Foundations
I wake at 5:47 a.m. because the Atlantic is roaring and because my body knows what day it is. I make tea in the small kitchen off our facilitator wing. I sit on the deck. I watch the sun come up over a cliff that has watched a great many sunrises before me, and I do the same practice I have done every morning of every retreat for nine years: I stand, I breathe, I let my arms find whatever shape they want to find, and I thank the lineages out
loud.
I thank Rukmini Devi for keeping Bharatanatyam alive when colonial India tried to erase it. I thank Steve Paxton for inventing contact improvisation in a studio in Vermont in 1972. I thank Marian Chace, who walked into St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington in 1942 and danced with people the rest of medicine had given up on. I thank Tatsumi Hijikata for inventing butoh in the rubble of Hiroshima. I thank my teachers by name. I thank my parents, who did not understand my career and danced at my wedding anyway. I thank the room.
This is the second thing I want to tell you about: this work is not mine. I am a custodian. I am a relay runner who has been handed something precious and is about to hand it forward to twenty-two people who will hand it forward in their own ways. The minute I forget that — the minute I start to think I am the source — is the minute I should be quietly retired and replaced.
Day One is foundations. We open with breath. We open with the floor. We open with the absurdly simple practice of standing in a circle and saying our name and one true thing. Not an interesting thing. Not an impressive thing. A true thing. The hedge fund founder says, My name is Dieter, and I have not been alone with myself for nineteen months. The hospice nurse says, My name is Asha, and I am tired in a way that scares me. The art teacher says, My name is Carmen, and I am here because my body told me to come and I am still mad at it for being right. You can feel the room change. We have not done a single moving practice yet, and the room has already changed.
Then we move. Chapter 1 practices condensed: Primordial Movement, Cultural Roots, the First Dance. We give them three hours. We don't correct. We don't shape. We don't compliment. We witness. Mirembe and I move slowly around the perimeter of the room making eye contact with anyone who is ready for eye
contact and looking gently away from anyone who is not. By lunch, twenty-two people who arrived as separate islands are starting to feel the tide that connects them.
And here is the third thing I want to tell you about, the thing I love most about Day One: this is the day people remember they are good at this. Not skilled. Good at it. Because every human is good at being a body. Every human has been moving since before they were born. The skill is not the point. The remembering is the point. By 4 p.m. on Day One, the woman from Frankfurt who hasn't moved her hips in public since her wedding has just spent forty-five minutes in a slow, grounded, hip-led movement exploration to a Toumani Diabaté kora track, and when we close the practice she walks past me and says, I forgot I was allowed to do that. And I just nod. Because that's it. That's the whole work. People forget they are allowed.
Day One ends with a long dinner, a fire, and stories. We sit on the floor — already, by Day One, the chairs feel wrong — and people tell their dance biographies. Carmen tells us about salsa nights in Bogotá with her grandmother. Dieter tells us about a single night in Berlin in 1998 that he has been chasing in some quiet way for twenty-six years. Asha tells us about her hospice patients teaching her to slow down by dying slowly, and the room gets very quiet, and then she laughs, suddenly, and says, and now I'm here, and you're going to make me dance, aren't you, and we all laugh, and the room is unrecognizable from yesterday.
Day Two — The Vocabulary of Feeling
Day Two is the day I both love and quietly dread, every retreat, every time. Because Day Two is Chapter 4, the Emotion Spectrum work, and Chapter 7, the trauma-aware emergence work, and these are the days when the bodies in the room start telling the
truth their owners have been managing around for years.
We start gentle. Laban Effort exploration in pairs. Weight, Space, Time, Flow. We let people play. We let them giggle when they catch each other looking ridiculous, because giggling is part of the protocol — Chapter 4 is very clear that humor is not the enemy of depth, it is the companion of depth. The body that cannot laugh cannot grieve. The body that cannot grieve cannot dance.
By mid-morning we are into Emotion Spectrum. Five emotions, five minutes each, with music carefully scored by our music director, who has been with us for six years and could pick a track for any human in any state with two minutes of warning. Joy, anger, grief, fear, awe. We don't perform these emotions. We embody them. We let them have the body for five minutes and then we let them go.
This is when the room cracks open.
I want to tell you about Dieter. Hedge fund founder. Sixty-two years old. Walked into the retreat looking like a man who had not been told no by anyone, including himself, in three decades. By the third emotion — grief — he is on the floor. Not dramatically. Not theatrically. He is just on the floor, on his hands and knees, and he is making a sound I have heard maybe forty times in nine years of doing this work. It is not a sob. It is older than a sob. It is the sound a body makes when it has been carrying something for nineteen months that it was not built to carry alone.
Mirembe is across the room with another participant. I see her clock Dieter without looking at him — she has the peripheral vision of a hawk and the discretion of a diplomat — and I see her give me the smallest nod. I move toward Dieter. I do not touch him. I sit, six feet away, in his peripheral vision, and I breathe slowly enough that he can hear me breathing. I do not say a word.
After about four minutes, he looks up. His face is a wreck. He says, I'm sorry. I say, Don't be sorry. Welcome. He laughs, once, the way you laugh when you've been crying. He says, My dog. I say, I know.
This is the fourth thing I want to tell you about, and it is maybe the most important. The work is not the practice. The work is the trust the practice creates. Dieter doesn't know me. We met thirty-six hours ago. But he is on the floor of a converted dance hall in Portugal grieving a dog he has not let himself grieve in the home where he has lived alone with that grief for nineteen months, and he is doing it because the practice has built — in thirty-six hours — a container that can hold him. We did not build the container with words. We built it with floor, with breath, with permission, with the witness of twenty-two other bodies who are also, in their own ways, on the floor.
By dinner Day Two, the room is gentle in a way it was not yesterday. People are quieter. They touch each other lightly on the arm when they pass. Asha has organized an impromptu tea round in the kitchen. Dieter is in the garden by himself, looking at the ocean. We don't intrude. The body is integrating. We let it.
Day Three — Identity, Performance, and The First Dance Floor
If Day Two is grief, Day Three is return. This is the day Mirembe and I have been quietly building toward since people walked off the bus. This is the day the retreat earns the word party, and the word party earns the word transcendental, and we get to demonstrate, with our bodies, that those two words have been in love with each other since prehistory and the only people who think they are different categories are people who have been to bad parties and bad meditation retreats.
Morning is Chapter 5: Identity. We embody the selves we perform, the selves we hide, the selves we have not yet met. Carmen finds a movement quality she has never moved with before, something low and deliberate and a little dangerous, and when she emerges from the practice she says, I think I just met the woman I'm going to be when I'm sixty. The whole room cheers. We have been together for fifty-two hours. We cheer for each other now. This is what happens.
Afternoon is Chapter 6: Performance Psychology. Stage presence. The pre-meeting ritual. The somatic anchor. I love this practice because it is the one most directly transferable to what most of these participants will go home to — the boardroom, the keynote, the difficult conversation. We give them tools. We give them embodied tools. By 5 p.m., people are walking around the venue trying their tools out, delivering imaginary speeches to the ocean, claiming presence in front of full-length windows. The art teacher Carmen and the hospice nurse Asha have an entire imaginary panel discussion in the garden in which they are interviewing each other for a fictional New York Times profile, and they are roaring with laughter, and they are also — I can see this from the deck — doing something quietly real underneath the laughter, which is that they are trying on what it would feel like to be seen.
And then, at 9 p.m., the dance floor opens.
I want to tell you about this floor.
The floor at Sintra is sprung wood, lightly oiled, perfectly maintained. Our music director has been building the night's set for three days based on what she has been watching in the room. She does not script. She responds. The lighting designer has tuned the room to deep amber for the opening hour and will move it through colors over the course of the night based on what she sees. The percussion ensemble — three drummers we travel with,
who have played together for fifteen years and finish each other's polyrhythms the way old couples finish each other's sentences — is on the platform at the back of the room.
The set opens slow. Cyclical. Ambient with low pulse. People walk in tentatively, find their spots, start to move. Within twenty minutes the room has dropped into what I can only describe as the field. You know it when you feel it. You also know it when you are responsible for its conditions. There is no leader on this floor. There is no choreography. There are twenty-two people moving however their bodies want to move, with a level of permission that very few of them have experienced in their adult lives, set inside a container Mirembe and I have spent three days building, with music and light that are answering their movement in real time. By 11 p.m. the music has lifted. Afrobeat, deep house, something polyrhythmic from Mali that the percussion ensemble layers over. Dieter — Dieter, the hedge fund founder, Dieter who was on the floor of grief yesterday — is dancing. I want to be specific about this. He is not dancing the way a sixty-two-year-old man at a corporate offsite dances. He is dancing the way a sixty-two-yearold man dances when he has just remembered, after four decades, that this is one of the things he was put here to do. His shoulders are loose. His knees are bent. He has found a small group — Carmen, Asha, the woman from Frankfurt, two others — and they have made a circle the way humans have made circles around fires for forty thousand years, and they are taking turns moving into the center, and the rest of the circle is witnessing the way we taught them to witness on Day One.
This is the fifth thing I want to tell you about, and it is the thing I love most about my calling. This is what people are for. This is what the body is for. This is what the species is for. We were never built to sit in offices and not look at each other. We were built to do exactly this: to gather in the dark, to move together, to let the music and the room and each other give us permission to
be the most alive version of ourselves, and to do it while taking care of each other.
I dance. Of course I dance. I would not be doing my job if I did not dance. I move through the room like a creature whose habitat this is, because it is. I make eye contact with whoever is ready for eye contact. I leave alone whoever needs to be left alone. At one point Asha — the hospice nurse, the tired one — finds me, and we dance together for one song, and at the end of it she puts her forehead briefly against my forehead and says, Thank you for the medicine, and I say, Thank you for letting it work, and we keep dancing.
The set closes at 1:14 a.m. with a thirty-minute live percussion improvisation that the drummers build out of nothing and the room receives like rain on a dry field. By the end people are not so much dancing as being moved. The percussion ensemble lands the closing rhythm with a final, perfect note that Mirembe and I have not pre-arranged with them, and the room holds, and the silence after is one of the great silences of my life.
People do not clap. They do not hoot. They stand. Some of them are crying. Some of them are laughing. Carmen is laughing and crying at the same time, which is, frankly, the correct response. We have just spent four hours doing something that was simultaneously the most fun any of us has had in a year and the most spiritually serious thing any of us has done in a decade. There is no contradiction. There has never been a contradiction. The contradiction was always a story Western culture told itself to keep its parties shallow and its temples grim.
Day Four — Collective Body and Improvisation
I will not write as much about Day Four because Day Four is the
day I am most tired and most full and most happy, and it is hard to write tired-full-happy in a way that doesn't sound like a brochure. What I will say is this: Day Four is when the group becomes a body. We do Chapter 8 work. Synchrony experiments. Leaderless dance. Contact Improvisation basics, which is the practice I think every human being on Earth should learn at age nine and use for the rest of their life, because if you can share weight and momentum with another body without losing yourself, you can pretty much do any other relational thing humans need to do. By Day Four we make things together that none of us could have made alone. A spontaneous twelve-person flock that moves across the room and reverses direction without a leader. A quartet improvisation between Dieter, Asha, Carmen, and the woman from Frankfurt that I would pay to watch on a stage in any city in the world. A whole-group spiral that breathes in and out for nine minutes set to a single, slowly building cello drone.
The closing ceremony Day Four is Chapter 11. The numinous. We do not call it that. We do not need to. We just open the practice. Dim light. Long silence. One small bell. Twenty-two people in a slow, eyes-closed, intentional movement to a piece of music our director has been holding back for three days. By the end, several people are kneeling. Several are standing very still. Dieter is, again, on the floor — but this is a different floor than Day Two. This is the floor of someone who has just been given, against all his expectations, a home.