Secret Garden Party was the party of the summer! A muddy, rainy first few days gave way to sun baked adventures and way too much fun :) Here are some of our dancers just before opening ceremonies Thursday night...
And here we are in the festival highlights! Abstract Disco at The Secret Garden Party 2012
The One Taste Stage was full of delight as people shook, shimmied, and whirled with us. The music was out of this world!! And the energy created, shared, and sent forth was absolutely incredible. Thank you to all!
This coming weekend we open up the main stage Sunday night at Cloud Cuckoo Land Festival :) Join us if you can! And wish us well otherwise.... namaste!
Hello hello! To tantalise and tease....here's a track mixing up our lovely friend and accomplished musician Emil Khan on the sarangi. Enjoy!!!
We Have Arrived (by Matt Kirk at The Abstract Disco) ;-D
Buddahfields Festival was a wonderful journey of craziness and sacred silence. I say sacred silence because the silence at the end of the set, when music stopped for the night, was potent with joyous embrace! The people sat or stood in complete stillness, and then someone started to ohm. After a few ohms we all laughed, it had been an amazing offering!
Here we are outside the tent just before heading down to the venue. We arrived on site 45 minutes before our set and put ourselves in motion!
Next week we go to Secret Garden Party where sensory delights wait in store for both techno heads and yoginis alike :) See you there!!
Here is an example of some of the genre bending and blending our musicians are up to. Working with music from the sacred traditions of Sufi Whirling and Belly Dance, they are layering tribal beats and electronic grooves - ranging from jungle to dark techno - into the music. In this track, a recent jam in the studio, you get a sense of how different genres mix and move the body to dance!
After Hours at The Abstract Disco
For weeks we have been making live recordings of musicians from within the Sufi tradition. This weekend their new mixes premier :) It promises to be a smashing good time where every body finds a sacred groove, manifesting the sacred core of life within us through the multiple sounds and blends of our wonderful DJs.
Meet the wonderfully talented, supremely dedicated, sexy and amazing
dancers of The Prisms of Isis... :)
Stephanie Britton is an ex-professional dancer, having danced from an early age and taking part in professional productions across the UK from the age of 15. Her passion for dance lies in the Ballet and Street styles, although she loves to discover and explore new styles such as Pole dancing, raving and more recently Whirling and Belly dancing. At 16 she began teaching Ballet, Tap, Contemporary and Street to 3-18 year olds. She obtained a Distinction in Ballet RAD Advanced level 1 and in ISTD Advanced level 1 Modern Jazz, before leaving dance to travel and pursue a career in Conservation. She holds a BSc in Geography and is about to complete a Masters in Conservation Science. She has continued to dance for the love of it and is really excited about this opportunity to perform as part of The Prisms of Isis!
Lucia Castano was born in Peru, a country full of blood mixtures, dramatic landscapes and ancient wisdom. She started dancing as a child to the rhythms of salsa, afro dance and pop music, and explored native Peruvian dance lessons throughout her childhood. Lucia studied Fine Arts in University and became an art teacher, while also creating her own art expression. In London she discovered contact improvisation and 5Rythms dance, as a way to reconnect with "source" and feel alive.
For Lucia, this dance project is about bringing tradition from ancient cultures and mixing it up with other forms of dance...the dancers experiencing the ecstatic power of movement, the joy of it and spreading it to the people around us...taking them to the joy of their bodies, their temples.
Marjo(lein) Kok has a big love for music with roots...since a very young age listening and dancing to traditional music from all over the globe......and so she developed a background in Flamenco, belly dance, African, gypsy and Latin American styles...recently exploring the integration of those with free movement through 5Rythms and ecstatic dance...something that has been a great learning experience for finding liberation and connection with self, others and the sacred.
Tuuli Manninen has a background in contemporary dance having studied and completed a dance diploma in Kallio School of performing arts in Helsinki. In London, she has experimented with contact improvisation and new dance forms through The Prisms of Isis. It has been a pleasure working with this wonderful group, by improvising and combining very different energies of movement varying from wild rave to meditative turning. Also, performing off-stage relates to Tuuli's on-going interest in dancing in unconventional spaces among the audience.
Tereza Silonova's most famous dance performance was probably the invocation of a fox at the age of four. This started her use of dance as the most truthful, transgressive and empowering art/life form. Since she has never received professional training, with styles from Latin-American to jazz and expressive to freestyle, the biggest teacher remained the people and music she danced with and for. She left the Czech Republic in 2009 to live and study in Italy. In September 2011 she moved to London to start her degree, to continue the journey and… to dance.
'Rma Sanchez-Bell has a Fine Art background, having studied at University of the Arts London. Exploration of narrative form in sculpture and installation pieces created a tactile and emotional relationship with materials, as well as a deeply embodied experience through the making process, which became art to her in itself. With the view that everything is connected, the art of movement is in the continual process of intersecting between every level of matter and spirit, weaving a rich tapestry embedded with myth, ritual, art and the truths of transformation.
She has since been exploring these themes of story and movement with performance art, dance improvisation, butoh, clowning, belly dance, anthropology, creative writing and textile jewellery... Currently part of the Earth Angels collective, performing with various musicians and artists including the conscious sounds collective and the live Fun N bass act clim8shift. Here to spread love, peace, and a conscious message of hope, sent to emerge from the foliage of festivals, parties and protests ready to bring blessings, music, dances, actions and spoken word cyphers.
