This weeks Dance First Member Insight is from Soul Kitchen Dance in Fort Collins, Colorado!
Soul Kitchen Dance is a nonprofit, free-form, conscious dance organization promoting health and creating community through the shared love of movement and music. Belongingness and strong community connection are vital human needs that are often lacking in our lives. Soul Kitchen Dance brings people together through a shared interest in music, movement, and health, fostering strong and lasting community bonds. We accomplish this by hosting regular weekly dances, an annual Spring retreat, quarterly community parties, and educational training for current and future facilitators.
Soul Kitchen Dance is a fun and liberating place for you to dance for JOY! More mind-body practice than a traditional dance class, Soul Kitchen is a safe, sacred, fun, and liberating space for everyone to enjoy movement. Each session focuses on movement and music that fosters each individual’s own authentic action. Simply put, Soul Kitchen Dance is movement and music to nourish your soul. It’s an uplifting place to bring your whole self: happy, sad, tender, fierce, sassy, sensual, vulnerable – real. Soul Kitchen Dance provides a cathartic opportunity for tension release, heart expansion, and joy.
This is music and movement to nourish the soul – spiritual food. Inside a safe space, we foster authentic movement and shared vulnerability to sate the soul’s hunger for freedom, expression, release, and connectivity. This spontaneous, unstructured, free-form movement within the safety of our conscious container ‘feeds’ us more profoundly and in more ways than any substance can. It is a fun, liberating movement that nurtures the soul’s cravings for health, wholeness, and happiness. And, as a free-form Conscious Dance, participants have no steps to follow. We, as a community, feed off the energy of others while also feeling free to dance as we are. We use our own spontaneous movement as a way to pay attention to our deeper selves, accessing the body’s wisdom beyond the mind’s thinking and opening more direct avenues to authentic self-expression.
Depending on the day, various music styles are woven together into an hour-long playlist that includes anything from international, electronic, hip hop, pop, reggae, jazz, blues, Latin, percussion, tribal r&b, soul, gospel, and new age music. The varied rhythms and sounds allow for more holistic self-expression; there is something for everyone.
Soul Kitchen Dance will reopen Sunday, Aug. 15, with a vaccine mandate in place.
