Liminality, flow and communitas in 5 Rhythms dance

Journal article

Liminality, flow, communitas and 5 Rhythms (5R) dance are all considered to have self-transformative powers, and 5R has been analysed as ritual, as movement therapy and as psychologically beneficial. Here, we take methodological inspiration from 5R as movement therapy via nonrepresentational geography, we attend to specific ways in which 5R can be psychologically beneficial by considering participant-identified paths to personal growth, and we examine links between 5R and ritual through a de/reconstruction of the 5R experience as liminal. Drawing on autoethnography and retrospective participant accounts within a research design characterised as ‘experimenting experience’, we identify myriad micro-liminalities that differ between dance contexts, vary within an individual dance context, and extend beyond the dance context, as well as a set of liabilities that constrain transformative potential. We advance recent work on liminality that moves beyond singular ideas of liminal spaces to multiple spatialities of liminality by framing 5R as an alchemy of liminalities. We also extend critical engagements with the proposed dimensions of flow with respect to its supposed sense of control by proposing the grounding of 5R flow in the lack of control generated by those liminalities, and we challenge the idea that individual flow leads to collective communitas by highlighting the incompatibility between loss of self-awareness in flow and the focus on self-identity in communitas, suggesting instead that flow and communitas are themselves related in liminal fashion in 5R. Thus, we make conceptual contributions to geography, psychology, anthropology and beyond, with potential to stimulate future scholarship in a host of cultural geographical domains, and we offer tentative suggestions as to how we might mobilise ‘experimenting experience’ for further development in these contexts.

Authors: Keltner-McNeil, N; Banfield, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Journal: cultural geographies
• Volume: 33
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 217-231
• Article number: 14744740251319034
• Publication date: 2025-02-13
• DOI: 10.1177/14744740251319034
• EISSN: 1477-0881
• ISSN: 1474-4740
• Language: English
• Keywords: 5 Rhythms dance; communitas; ritual; liminality; flow