Temenos Dance Collective
Avant-Garde Conscious Dance
The Temenos Dance Collective is an innovative conscious movement project offering safe, wholesome and inspirational movement experiences in London.
The project began in 2023 as a series of one-off conscious dance parties but has evolved over the last two years to offer a range of classes and sessions.
With the belief that dance is essential for good health and wellbeing, sessions are structured to provide participants with a supportive environment to explore and develop their movement practice, make connections and experience the benefits of community.
Nearly all sessions are hosted by Temenos founder, Felix Oram, with some workshops and special events featuring guest facilitators and teachers from across the spectrum of conscious movement including, but not exclusively, 5Rhythms, Contact Improvisation, and Ecstatic Dance.
As part of its commitment to making conscious movement affordable to all Temenos offers a £5 Monthly Subscription that entitles subscribers to a 20% discount on all classes and workshops as well as an invitation to attend two sessions each month completely free: one designated Movement Journey session and the Temenos late-night community social, Sounds Of The Underground, held on the last Saturday of each month.
Our weekly sessions are held every Tuesday and Friday evening in King's Cross and Hackney respectively, with the addition of specialist workshops and dances hosted on various Saturdays through the year.
Our regular sessions include:
Human BE:IN - a weekly Tuesday evening session that invites attendees to find ways to come into the present moment through meditation, sharing and moving together.
Movement Journey - a weekly Friday evening session that supports dancers to engage with their inner landscape and find ways to move and express themselves.
S.O.T.U - a monthly Saturday night community and social event that offers dancers a chance to connect and socialise with others in the community and enjoy a less structured space to dance in.
Movement Trilogy - a six hour immersion exploring the three main modalities of conscious dance, Contact Improvisation, 5Rhythms and Ecstatic Dance, these sessions are hosted by Felix Oram and two guest teachers from the worlds of Contact Improvisation and 5Rhythms, and are held two or three times per calendar year.
Deep Space - a restorative stillness-based session that uses meditation, gentle movement and sound healing courtesy of a gong bath from Kaja Nur from Liberating Sounds. These sessions are held throughout the autumn and winter months.
Movement Class - one off sessions and workshops hosted by professional dancers and teachers with specific areas of expertise.
Please head to the Tickets tab on the website to see what's coming up and to join any of our events.
WHAT DOES THE WORD TEMENOS MEAN?
In ancient Greece a temenos was a sacred enclosure or precinct - a piece of land marked off from common uses and dedicated to a god. It has also been described as a sacred circle where a person can be themselves without fear and where drama can be performed for the purpose of spiritual, emotional and psychological transformation. For ancient Greeks the purpose of the temenos was to have a space that was sacred and that would not be polluted with daily concerns and interferences. The boundary of the temenos served to both contain the energy and protect it.
More recently Carl Jung encouraged us to understand the temenos as an emotional and psychological space as well as a physical one. He described temenos as “a means of protecting the centre of the personality from being drawn out and from being influenced from the outside. It is within such a space that important and unruly unconscious contents can be safely brought into the light of consciousness.
The Temenos Dance Collective seeks to create and foster safe spaces (temenos') to congregate and move in. Environments where time and space can be set aside so that, collectively, we can reinvigorate and replenish and develop a deeper connection to ourselves, our fellow human beings and to the life force that runs through the universe. A temenos cannot be bought, rather it must be cultivated. It must be developed over time through conscious intention and careful work.