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Riding
Jonathan Horan's Waves
By
Suzanne Wright
Jonathan Horan moves his body like a kid works a Slinky. Horan,
who looks like a 30-something surfer boy with his long limbs and
bleached blonde hair, is the son of Gabrielle Roth, the creator
of a spiritual, dynamic movement practice called 5Rhythms, developed
over the past three decades. To look at the pair, you'd never
connect them as mother and son. Tall, dark and angular, she moves
with catlike grace and authority, while he stalks the room with
a boundless, raw energy that is buoyant and infectious. Horan
has worked with his mother as a colleague for more than ten years,
leading workshops all over the world.
 Roth's
most avid student and sought-after instructor grew up at Esalen,
surrounded by people involved in the human potential movement.
Horan says he was exposed to “the catharsis” of the
work his mother taught. “It was natural, it was good and
it was healing. There was a noticeable difference between the
people who were working on themselves and the people who weren't.
That was really key for me because at that very young and innocent
time, I innately felt that this was important, that I liked this
energy and that I liked people, and that I got more from people
who were taking part in their own process.”
And he saw his mother's impact as a teacher. “There was
an incredibly different vibe from the room where Gabrielle was
working with people-an enormous difference in their energy as
they were walking out of the room. I saw how much she embodied
this information that she was passing on and how beautiful that
wisdom was for me.”
Roth returns the compliment. “Jonathan is an extraordinary
teacher with depth, integrity, passion and playfulness. It honors
me that my son has embodied the spirit of my work and teaches
it in the originality of his own vision.”
In his workshops, students embark on a pilgrimage of self-discovery
rooted in movement using the five universal rhythms of flowing,
staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness that his mother developed.
The spirit of the work is freedom.
“It's amazing to me how (my mother) found a way to root
freedom in the true, religious sense of the word. We learn to
be more real, more grounded, more willing to be an open book,
when we dance,” he says.
Being real, of course, often results in painful, sad, scared,
angry, or frustrated feelings. The magic of the dance is in not
repressing any of those feelings.
“The first level is knowing you have feelings and giving
yourself permission to feel. The permission part for me is the
very root, because without the permission there really is no freedom.
The second level is taking responsibility for your feelings and
being willing to communicate them. The third level is learning
to use your emotional energy as fuel for artistic expression.
We're digging up feelings to create something bigger.”
Workshop participants explore the direct link between the state
of their bodies and the state of their emotions through intrinsic
movement and trance-dance to a wide spectrum of music. Dancers
release what's held in their hearts, translating their physical
fluidity into emotional fluidity. Because there's no “technique,”
Waves is appropriate for anybody, at any skill level in dance
or movement, who's willing to move, sweat, dance, grow and
open his or her heart. The power of the work lies in this willingness
to be.
“If you bottle everything up for long enough, then it's
really scary to even want to touch the edges of it because you're
afraid that you're going to become truly out of control. That's
why it's so essential to have some kind of practice that,
on a regular basis, that allows you to just drain all of that
stuff out of your body and empty it,” says Horan.
Leaving the ego behind is another benefit of this practice.
“You're going to do better at any sport-or anything else
you're doing-if your internal life is in order. If you have
an idea of what's going on energetically in yourself, in other
people, in a community, in the place where you live-if you're
able to look beyond the surface of everything-then you have an
amazing secret weapon.”
Increasingly, the power of dance, music and ritual are being reclaimed
in our hectic lives.
“When we dance in this way, it's about working with your
energy, with your life. It's like martial arts-balancing,
harmonizing, grounding. By opening up and seeing the full perspective
of what is out there when you're in a room with all those
people, you realize you're not as isolated or different as
you thought you were.”
Dance
Jonathan Horan's Waves March 5- March 7 at Atlanta's Yoga Samadhi.
For information, call 678-937-0049; email: thewaveatlanta@yahoo.com.
Suzanne Wright is a freelance commercial writer.Contact her at suzannewright@juno.com
or 404-875-5618.
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Dance
