Body Temple 2006
I have waited for the last six months the Body Temple event to take place in NY. Finally the weekend of heavy rains showed up together with the Body Temple at the Brooklyn Lyceum, formerly a 19-century gigantic bathhouse converted into a beautiful, raw theater space.
I invited a friend of mine from Brazil to attend with me as this type of urban underground alternative event still lets the hip upper-downtown Manhattan crowd somehow uncomfortable. We did not choose to attend the Shamanic Trance traveling from the Womb’s Ecstasy to the Cosmic Underground dance ritual at 8.30 am because we were both uncertain and did not feel like loosing some of our spirit or any part of ourselves even if they told us actually that we would come into ourselves so much more. Apparently, the dance is a heightened awareness, not an escape from consciousness.
It is often hard for each of us to let go, especially if it’s right at the beginning of the party when the favorite South Asian composer Karsh Kale and idol is going to play after midnight. Better to be cautious. Body Temple is an evolving experience that fully synthesizes the healing and the performing arts. It is a spiritual opera, a tantric circus, a performing mystery school, and a shamanic journey. We blur the lines between dance club, ceremony and theater, and create an environment where the tribal and the mythic coexist on the cutting edge. Body Temple integrates ancient tribal traditions and emerging new technologies within the modern dance club world.
This event has brought together the magical connection between shamans, alternative healers, mystics, performers, DJ’s and live musicians. People can experience the same kinds of ecstatic experiences that our ancestors found in dancing, religious rituals and ceremonies. Today it incorporates all of this using the driving beats of global trance music, creating a multi-sensory dance temple.
Well, with this information you can imagine our expectation about how we would feel after the ultimate modern mythic experience. We decide to take the R train at 10:30 from Manhattan Fifth avenue and the experience starts when a man asks me if the “diamond” in my sandal is for real and if so how much I think it would be worth, and what would it buy. Arriving on Fourth Street we could immediately catch a glimpse of the Brooklyn Lyceum. We ask some cigarette-smoking yogis if it was the place where the Body Temple was taking place, and without waiting for an answer climbed the stairs to the entrance. Our hands were quickly stamped and we were served some coconut water for 4 dollars (could not at all recognize the taste from home in Brazil, and we are told that it is because the young coconuts are from Thailand).
At my surprise the music catches me, almost instantly drunk by DJ Derek Beres sound, my favorite in the city. It’s his birthday and he plays magic. Electronic salsa is in the air and the most indescribable scene takes place in the theatre. Bodies and performers from all over move in rhythmically at completely different paces from each other, but all of them wildly harmonically tuned with every fraction of time and beat like being the only ones in the temple of rhythm and sound. I find myself jumping around like a rhythmic goddess not really caring about anyone around me; this time I am not worried about seduction, just want to fly and break free with the magic of the almost tribal experience.
And, believe me, I did. The coconut water tasted delicious and the strange folkloric dances were stimulating me to want more of that sensual chocolate elixir for sale in the lounge near the smoking yogis. No drug or alcohol was served, only natural drinks; just the vibration and intention of the eccentric crowd with all its ethnicity and desire to connect, be and let their body-mind melt and integrate in time and in a globe-sonic space.As someone wisely said, Body Temple fans are burners, yogis, metro spirituals, trance dancers, rainbows, travelers, trend setters, seekers, explorers, adventurers… And obviously myself.
Four o’clock, the inner temple of my body and soul is seeking for silence and after all this rytmic cleaning up from dark spirit, requests for comfy pillows and honorable bed sheets.
Tomorrow at the Ruben Museum I’ll be on my way to the “Tantric Madness” exhibition to understand it all at once…
Ahhhhhh, New York…! When will you finally go to sleep?
