RITUAL: Solstice - what happened
Wow. What joy. Our hearts are still full.
A week on from our first ever RITUAL, and we're still floating. We held it on the Saturday nearest the solstice, in the beautiful high-ceilinged Old School Rooms in Clapton - six hours, all in white, sober, and almost entirely without words. We came in a little nervous (who are we to hold a ritual?) and left completely blown away - by our facilitators, our spaceholders, and above all by the guests who trusted us, and each other, enough to go all the way in.
Here's how the day moved.
We'd been hesitant, at first, about putting performances into a day whose whole point was to activate everyone - we didn't want anyone slipping into passively watching rather than doing. But witnessing has its own creativity; the body starts to imagine its own response. So we chose to open each of the three portals of the day with a story and a dance to carry us through. Lauren wrote the words - three poems tracing the arc from Apollo to Dionysus - and Alex read them in that ever-enchanting voice of his, while Lauren, Mina Beresford-Stooke and Naila Zulfugarova exploded into dance to open the day. Our first performance was formal and processional; the second grew wilder as we folded in the energies of Dionysus; the third dissolved into connection, our trio of Maenads reminding us that none of us is ever really singular - that we are many.
Voice. The first portal was song, held by the sublime and irrepressible Yush (Soham Pathak) alongside Mischa Huijsmans. Yush first appeared like an angel during Shakti Rising, and we've since formed a little vocal group that meets every few weeks to explore the world of transcendental human sound. At RITUAL he took us somewhere else entirely: we slowly, repeatedly deconstructed the sound of Om for twenty minutes, and the resonance was divine. We'd asked them to take the whole room into a trance - and we think they truly did, because the room then erupted, all on its own, into joyous dance alongside the chant. We are now officially addicted; chanting is in our veins.
"The chanting was mind blowing. I didn't quite know what to expect, and I'm not quite sure what I took part in, but it was amazing, beautiful and profound. I left on a natural high." - Ian
Movement. The second portal was movement, led by the maestro that is Dominik Schnell of Heart Wave. The first time we went to one of Dom's dances it undid us completely - Lauren sobbed, utterly transformed. We love how he tempts a room into edgier, more connective, more collective territory than most ecstatic dance dares to. At RITUAL his session was exquisite. We especially loved the blindfolded explorations - bodies meeting one another with no ocular judgement at all - and the final supine spiral of humanity was almost unbearably touching.
Between movements, during one of the breaks, we invited everyone to lay something down. Guests paused, reflected, and offered a few words to small slips of dissolving paper - burdens, fears, whatever no longer served them - which were fed one by one to a bowl of water and vanished, words and all.
"A joyous new way of marking the Solstice, in communion with others, in conscious focused attention." - Craig
Touch. The final portal was the one we'd wondered about most: conscious touch. As two ex-nerds who spent years lost in books and living in our heads, we've both come to trust the wisdom of the body, and we've been exploring the innocent edges of human connection in workshops for a few years now. We began with a tender moment of mutual handwashing and purification, and ended with mummification. A few guests were understandably hesitant here - we suspect one or two feared it signalled some slide into a BDSM orgy! We see it far more innocently: a beautiful, tender, gently held way for the body to be fully embraced, and to surrender to the care of others. Watching that hesitation melt into pleasure - the surprise and delight on so many faces - was one of the most moving things of the whole day. There really was transformation at the heart of it.
"Thank you so much for the safe container. Mummification was my highlight!" - Nadia
To every single guest who came, connected so deeply, and dared to suspend judgement and go beyond: thank you. To Yush and Mischa, to Dom, to our dancers, and to our brilliant team of spaceholders and wellbeing guardians - and to Jolly Thompson for the luscious photographs - thank you. You made it what it was.
We came in asking whether we had any right to call this a ritual. One guest, Niki, answered that better than we ever could: she called it "a true ritual in every sense of the word," and said she left "with a full heart, beautiful connections, and the lingering feeling that I'd been sprinkled with fairy dust."
We left knowing these are some of the things we love most in the world - and that we can't wait to do it all again.
And we will. Our next RITUAL falls at Samhain in October. Before that, there's Dionysus himself: our Bacchanal, in September. The sun has turned. We'll see you in the dark.
