MAGAN'S WORLD:Manchán Magan's tales of a travel addict
MY MOST terrifying holiday was not the time I was arrested in Nairobi, or imprisoned in Peru, or even the time I was shot at in the Middle East. No, it was in Longford three years ago, when a Swiss-American choreographer asked me would I like to join a week-long dance holiday at Shawbrook ballet school. The fact that I had no dance experience didn’t seem to phase her. “You’ll pick it up,” she said breezily. And so I found myself on the most frightening and exhilarating week of my life, desperately trying to keep up with a phalanx of ballerinas and contemporary dancers as they pirouetted and pliéed around a dance studio.
Ever since, I’ve been wondering if one could replicate the exhilaration of that week, without suffering the humiliation of not knowing the steps. Imagine a holiday entirely spent dancing? Some form of dance that didn’t require complicated choreography, or even having innate natural rhythm. A type of dancing suited to those of us who normally require a bellyful of drink before shuffling to the floor.
I may have found one. It’s called 5 Rhythms Dance, a form of dance/movement meditation that is designed primarily to let your body do whatever it wants to do – swing, glide, sashay, spin, stride. 5 Rhythms is about setting your body free to move to a range of ultra-danceable music under a series of five loose headings: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness. It’s not as airy-fairy or esoteric as you might think. It’s more like being the one child in the playground who is off in his own world, moving exactly as he feels like. Some of the people who practice are a bit Birkenstocky and whale-savingy, but most are just ordinary bread’n’butter types, who drink and curse and would happily eat chopped-up cow served in a bun. Put it this way, for every flouncy hippy, there’s a rotund ex-janitor.
5 Rhythms is huge in America, but there are only a couple of facilitators in Ireland: Jenny Fahy in Cloughjordan, and Caitríona Nic Ghiollaphádraig based between Galway and Dublin. Caitriona is leading a week-long 5 Rhythms dance holiday in the Burren this July (deorade.com). Would you dare to go along? Would it terrify you? Spending that length of time relating to strangers only through dance must make for a pretty profound experience. The longest I spent practicing 5 Rhythms was two days, and the whole world seemed different after.
It’s being held in the Boghill Centre (boghill.com), outside Lisdoonvarna, which sounds like an interesting place in its own right – a residential centre on 50 acres of protected bogland offering courses in traditional music, yoga, eco-building, etc. They’re currently building a mud house and something called “a barefoot path”.
Residential eco-centres are becoming ten-a-penny. At some point I mean to check out The Gyreum (gyreum.com), a massive UFO-shaped wooden building beside the Carrowkeel cairns in Sligo. They offer residential courses ranging from building your own windmill to gorging on Russian movies. Their website proclaims that they are neither “New Age fluffy nor short on humour”.
On Clare Island in Co Mayo there’s a yoga centre on an organic farm which produces sheep’s milk, country wines, honey and herbal teas and has working Connemara ponies (yogaretreats.ie). And in Cork, the Hollies Centre (thehollies online.com) specialises in eco-building, but they don’t really offer accommodation other than camping and some rooms for long-term volunteers. They also run courses on wild foraging and how to build a “chicken tractor”.
So, which is it to be this summer: 5-rhythming, barefoot-pathing or chicken- tractoring? Feel the fear.