Flashmobs will also save the world

Back in 2019, I was directing an elementary school production of the Lion King. The kids had been rehearsing for almost 4 months when the pandemic hit, and that cast never got to perform. In 2021 we recast a show and when we finally got to put it on stage, I realized just how much moving, dancing, singing together as a collective helped to process the trauma that those kids just didn’t have words for.

Every year, I also lead the Thriller dance flash mob in my community. We have dancers as young as five, most of them nowhere near professional, all moving together and creating a sense of community and joy that go so much deeper than a neighborhood BBQ, for example

Although, of course, social change is going to need much more than flashmobs, I do think this type of community joy, movement, and healing is exactly what the world needs right now.

Bernice Johnson Reagon, a racial justice activist and singer, who sadly died last year, once said in an interview something like, “ when the injustice and atrocities of the world make you feel powerless, sometimes the only thing that can get you to the next day is the movement of sound through your body and the movement of your body with your community.”

In our unhealed, overly individualistic American society, the opportunities to sing and dance together as a group are almost nonexistent. 

Singing and dancing have become purely performative and something to be judged, rather than something that happens in everyday communities experienced by everyday community members.

My partner loves to tell the story of going to the Caribbean and walking into a bike rental shop and having a group of teenage boys just singing together. This was not a threat to their masculinity, but just something they were doing together.

Singing and dancing together as a collective is healing in ways we are only beginning to understand in terms of collective trauma recovery. Singing and dancing together as a group helps to disrupt unhealthy patterns that can be stored from unhealed wounds, it can repair and rebuild social bonds, and rewire the nervous system, not just our individual nervous systems, but our collective one as well.

So… if you have a chance to join some sort of community that moves and sings together (that hopefully does not come with narcissistic, toxic leadership), I invite you to do so. 

If you are in the Denver metro area, you are welcome to join our Colorado Thriller Dancers. Feel free to reach out to me for more information. You can also join the FB page: JOIN HERE

SPEAKING OF COMMUNITY:

Have you heard of The Connected Community Podcast?! OMG- Nicky Yazbeck is so inspiring and has covered some amazing topics! I got the pleasure of sitting down with her to discuss polyvagal work and it was such a great conversation.