The first of seven online seminars planned for 2023-2024, by the hostess, Sylvie Lagache, a contemporary dancer, therapist with a master's degree in theology specializing in liturgy is
scheduled for November 4 at 4 p.m. on the theme: “Dance in the liturgy.” Says Lagache, “I will develop the importance of a spiritualized body for a liturgy that is less mechanical, flat, reduced to formalism, but more lively, celebrating the living.”
Lagache will develop the concept of a “spiritualized body” for a liturgy less reduced to formalism, but more lively, celebrating the Living. She will also talk about mystical dance and the parallel between the bodily learning of a dancer and the learning of the inner way. “Being in your body as a temple of God and dance the prayer,” says Lagache.
The first seminar will focus on mystical dance and the parallel between the bodily learning of a dancer and the learning of the inner path: breath, anchoring, verticality and meditation and projection (giving and receiving). We will dialogue together on the universal dimension of dance as unity between religions.
“I have chosen to present to you a dance on the Kyrie Eleison, because for me, it is the message that Christ came to bring, that is to say the inner movement that every Christian must go through:
recognizing his errors, his transgressions, his negative emotions (anger, fears…) for a possible transformation which is metanoia, conversion,” says Lagache. “It's going from the Old Man bent and closed in on himself to the New Man, straight and open, on the move! It is Man resurrected in Christ, a subject developed in my book “The Unified and Spiritualized Body.”
Lagache says, she invited to this seminar first of all people who have been with her, one Ana for over 30 years and the other Beto for over 10 years, in Brazil. Both continue basic classical dance
classes with breathing online. They will give their testimony in relation to dance and spirituality. Then she invited a dancer and dance therapist from Ivory Coast who lives his Christian faith
deeply and who will come and talk to us about the importance of dance in the Church.
“So the dance that I propose is not of the order of representation, but rather it is a communion between Man and God and God and Man. It is a prayerful dance, because instead of praying with
words we will pray with the body. The gestures purport to express prayer, repentance, listening, contemplating, bowing, begging, rising up, receiving grace,” adds Lagache.
The zoom link is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9414526266. Visit:
https://youtu.be/dUK45NusSF8 . One can register at [email protected]
