by Cinnamon Twist

What's the next step beyond raving? How far can we take group dance energy without the use of chemicals? How can we refine the transformative power of our dance?

Many of us have experimented with various ways of deepening the spiritual dimensions of raving, whether with altars at parties, invocations, hand-holding circles, meditations, or freeform chanting.

Perhaps one of the boldest moves in this direction so far has been made by a 32 year old Australian dancer by the name of Antara. Antara has gathered a set of "keys" -- breathing, chanting and movement patterns -- which she believes can be used to induce ecstatic states without the help of drugs.

While as yet unknown to the dance scene at large, Antara played a central role in Return to the Source, the legendary UK Goa trance club, and oversaw the production of the ambitious double-CD/book, The Chakra Journey. The concept of "the chakra journey" was derived from a Return to the Source New Year's Eve party, where the revelers were treated to a multimedia evocation of the seven chakras, or energy centers, of Hindu yogic philosophy. All the music on the CD was written to express specific qualities of each chakra, and the whole booklet similarly organized.

Antara showed up recently in LA, and made a few serious ripples in the deep underground. An Earthdance party, timed to coincide with a number of other "Free Tibet" parties around the globe, and two intimate "chakra journey" workshops, were the more visible results of her visit.

A Trance Dancer with a Mission

Something of a powerhouse packed into a pixyish frame, Antara seems about as much "there" most the time as the rest of us are when peaking on our favorite psychoactive. She has a definite vision for how the dance underground can move forward to build on the possibilities that have been opened up. Antara is a trance dancer with a Mission.

"The time has come," she proposes bluntly, "for us to really harness this powerful energy we are raising on the dance floor. When we gather to dance together in love and light we have an immense power to affect the rest of the world. If a hundred of us dance together this way, we can spread that consciousness-energy to a thousand other people, if a thousand of us dance it can ripple out to ten thousand others."

In contrast to the often hollow rhetoric of the rave scene, Antara comes off as someone prepared to do whatever it takes to see this potential realized. For that to happen, however, she believes a break with the standard approach to throwing events will be required.

"It's no longer about just stick the DJs and the sound system in a space and have loads of people going off. That can actually be very draining, and far from an ecstatic unifying experience. A lot of kids come out of events feeling disoriented, not understanding you've been purifying, that emotional stuff comes up and needs to be dealt with. But boom, you're thrown onto the street, go home, come down off your E and feeling your feelings. It can be very difficult to integrate the experiences this way. But many of us are totally over that way of doing it.

"Right now we have a certain form, and the promoters and DJs putting on the events are presenting a journey, but they don't have an understanding of how the journey can actually work to balance the energy centers of the crowd. We need to learn how to work with those levels shamanically, to understand heart frequency, how to lock in through this level with the awesome resources we now have in multimedia light and sound."

What is the nature of this energy? What can we do with it, and how can we avoid dissipating it when do succeed in raising it?

Antara's approach is to create sacred spaces on the dance floor--"temporary temples," if you like*--which help us to ground, focus and consciously direct these energies. To achieve this, she creates an eclectic ritual format made up of equal parts new age ceremony, "shamanic" technique and sacred geometry.

Antara believes that different cultures over time have developed forms of expression that tend to emphasize particular chakras over others. But with the current explosion of electronic dance genres, we now have a multi-dimensional music to help us dance the "dance of every chakra." Thus in her workshops she makes use of the complete spectrum of electronic sub-genres, from ambient to jungle to tribal to full-on Goa trance, as stages in a process of energetic purification, balancing and conscious release.

The Workshop

For a better taste of what Antara is up to, join us at one of her little workshops in a wooden-floored dance studio in Hollywood. As we enter, each of us gets saged in turn. A simple little altar of crystals and feathers sits against a dark backdrop. Some photocopies of geometric "flower-of-life" diagrams pinned to each wall. There's about twenty of us, sitting in a big circle.

A brief explanation of how "toning," or vocalizing, can be used to release old traumas and negative imprints from our bodies. "Remember to breathe through your 'central tubes,' keep your energy flowing. The more light we bring in the more fear and blockage comes up, so find the sounds that go to those places in your body, and chant them out, let them move. Let's shake ourselves free of all our little shadow loops," (a term of her own devising).

In her handouts, Antara explains her use of the chakra system: "The chakras act as interfaces between the physical body and the subtle fields of energy from which the physical is derived. They are the bridge between light and form. In our sessions we activate and balance the chakras with breath work and movement, facilitating the release of stagnant energy. What is at the core of the blocked chakric energy flow is often frozen emotions, so the more we breathe and open the body in those places of contraction, we will experience emotional release as our once repressed feelings are allowed to flow."

Antara walks around making strange little hums and aaahs and other non-describable vocalizations, getting warmed up. We hold hands, give our names and say a little something. Then we stand, facing in each of the four directions as Antara invokes some friendly androgynous deities. We point our arms upwards and inwards, visualizing a pyramidal shape extending down towards us and then condensing from our feet to a point deep in the earth. Then each of us brings our arms together in front and point at each other person in the room, imagining a beam of light from our heart to theirs. "By connecting our hearts together like this we're opening a dimensional portal to bring more light into this world." We do some deep breathing together, shift back and forth, shake to warm up.

What's cool is that the structure Antara provides is relatively free-form and playful. It's like, try this on for size, if it works, go with it, if it doesn't, follow your intuition. some breathing patterns and chants to open up particular energy centers. The sound shifts from ambient drone to a building tribal pulse, and we sink down into a martial arts-like power stance, shake our booties, connect with the earth, all the while Antara chants and hums and buzzes freely. At points as we try on these different intonations we just go with the flow, and you can hear us all starting to tune into to each other's frequency, finding a common harmonic. The group hum starts to vibrate in your own throat and you push it a notch higher, the group follows, to a crescendo of all of us howling at the top of our lungs, so loud it's amazed the friendly neighborhood cop doesn't stop by. Antara is constantly circulating among the group, interacting now with one person, now another, prodding and encouraging us to go further, deeper.

The beat speeds up, sounds get harder, we're now bouncing frenetically, breathing in sipping breaths twice and one out breath, ooh ooh ahhh, ooh ooh ahhh, in time to the beat, getting louder and louder till together we sound like some giant Indian tom-tom thudding , the circle breaks up and everybody is running back and forth chaotically around the room, gesticulating at and breathing with each other. And so it goes through various spins and turns of vibe and beat and breath, eventually we wind up lying down, facing up, then reassemble in a big hand-holding circle.

Everybody seems pretty elated. Can't speak for anyone else, but I'm definitely feeling more together, clearer and cleaner than when I came in. Two or three hours of this intensive breathing, chanting and dancing have me pleasantly wiped out the way I would be after 7 hours of nonstop raving, but minus the often hollow, glazed feeling from coming down off something or other. (Of course, the inevitable questions echo in my head, "this is pretty cool, but how much more transformational with psychedelics?)

The Origin of the Keys

So how did Antara get into all this stuff, where did she collect all these little "keys" she playfully shares with the rest of us?

"I started doing dance work since 1988. At that time I was 23, going to art school in Japan, I was into ceramics, but there wasn't enough spirit and pulse in it. Then I met my ex-partner Chris Dekker, he would drum and I would dance. He would remember rhythms that would somehow go into my body and open me up, I'd start shaking and get a very deep release from his drumming.

"Meanwhile I was working in a flotation tank center and during a float I got this message, "dance for self-healing--that is your path." I was like, OK, where do I go from here? Where do I take this? There is no structure for this, and I wanted to understand more. Then I was dancing and performing, mainly African dance, stuff with drums and didgeridoos, on the streets or at festivals. We called it ritual dance, though we really didn't understand what that meant at the time, we just liked the sound of it.

"I got the message that 'you are the teacher, the teacher is within you.' But I still looked outside for external teachings. One of my first mentors was Gabrielle Roth. After reading her book I left Australia to study with her. I told her, "I really want to be your apprentice." She said to me, "I've seen what you do, follow your heart, you've got your own work to do." I worked with other people, I took some essence from each of my teachers but they pushed me back on myself and said find your own path. I spent some time in Holland with Frank Powers (author of a book on Trance Dance). Later I went to the Rajneesh ashram in Puna, India and did dance meditation training there."

Eventually Antara and Chris wound up in London, where they threw a benefit party for a friend who had been jailed in India. A manager at the Dome Nightclub approached them to partner on a regular event. Chris hooked up with trance DJ Mark Allen, and Return to the Source was launched: "My role was taking care of the sacred elements of the party. With Chris we came up with the idea of making the club into a temple space. We set up crystal grids around 4 sides of the dance floor. We would cleanse the space with sage, invoke a field of light and banish any negative forces. Sometimes we'd put a seven pointed star on the floor, or cast a four-directional medicine wheel. I also had a choreographic dance group called the Sushumna Ritual Dance Theater. We would do ceremonies at the party. In the beginning they were performances up on the stage, but that didn't feel right, so we started doing them in the middle of the dance floor. As time went on we wanted to get more interactive, wanted to breathe live with the crowd. But the rest of the Return to the Source collective didn't agree with that direction, so I felt I had to move on.

Group Bonding with No E!

"From an evolutionary perspective, I'm seeing very much now that we can go further in how we present these events so that it is a safer environment to journey deeper and even get more ecstatic. In terms of our evolution as a dance culture from 87/88 ‘til now we have been primarily doing our individual purification in the dance. What's beginning to occur is that many of us are saying OK, we want to take this to another level now."

At a second, similar workshop at a friend's loft space in Santa Monica, another twenty of us go even deeper, this time the group energy really gels, every single person in the room is dancing maniacally, looking each other straight in the eyes; there is an intensity you can never get at raves where there are always passive spectators and other people too fucked up to interact at all. Later, we have an intense tight circle where our knees are up against one another's, each person puts one hand on the back of the person to the right and the other on the hand of the person to the left. We synchronize our breathing and humming, and pass the flow of heart energy around and around in a circle. Look ma, group bonding with no E! Personally, if I didn't know better, I'd call this some kind of a tribal donut. Pretty rad.

Clearly this format is far too touchy-feely for a lot of people. Perhaps the majority of ravers out there don't have the least inclination to be part of a formal spiritual ceremony, and it probably wouldn't work at all in groups larger than a hundred or so, anyway. What does make it click is that Antara has a feel for the energy of each person and the group as a whole, an intuitive knowledge that goes beyond the standard New Age shtick. While rap is full-on Pleiadian-New Age flavor** -- Christ consciousness, energy grids, fifth dimensional portals, etc. -- she insists she doesn't talk about anything she hasn't experienced directly.

To Trip or Not to Trip?

Obviously Antara's done her days of heavy shrooming, and found the New Age lingo a workable vocabulary to express what she's found. And she does still trip, though not at parties any more. Here, she sounds a cautionary note: "What often occurs when people do psychedelics, if we don't understand how to breathe, pulse and stay radiating in love, is that the psychedelics will take us into our shadow loops, and show us our fear-based thinking, and whatever we believe and think will be manifested to us in our environment. So what happens when you start to plug into your fears, they affect how the chakras spin, creating little glitches or slits in your energy field, and when you're not radiating light these holes in your field can attract astral entities." Hmmm. . .

On a more positive note, Antara sees the value of psychedelics "as a doorway to show us the reality of inner realms. Once we've been shown that, then there's an initiatory process. If we're given the maps how to get there, it's up to us to do the work. We can access those states without the psychedelics once we learn how to work with these energy keys."

The name, by the way, she received at an 11:11 Star Ceremony in Holland. AN-TA-RA. . . a kind of mantra that may perhaps trigger a moment of recognition among the other members of the scattered soul family out there.

Will the "keeper of the keys," as she describes herself, make it back to LA to form the "Heart-Core" of temporary temple dancers someday soon? Stay tuned.

* The term "temporary temple" originated with The Temple of Psychick Youth, a magickal correspondence cult formed by Genesis P. Orridge of Psychic TV back in the early 80's.

**See Barbara Marciniak's book, Earth: Keys to the Living Library.

Related articles:

Freedom, Can we Handle It?
A serious critique of the rave scene's shortcomings with regard to drugs and ritual - contrasting the (mythical) Woodstock ideal with the recent "Freedom" rave in Northern California, by Robert Phoenix. (Beam 3/99)