Circle Dancing: Celebrating the Sacred in Dance

June Watts is a leading figure in The Sacred Circle Dance movement. Here she describes every aspect of this growing movement, the people, the places, the dances, the music. All over the world people are awakening to the Sacred Power of dance. This is the first book to explore the link between the modern Sacred Dance movement and its historic heritage going back to the stone age.

Movement is the keynote of my life. When I was a child the family was constantly on the go! My father’s work moved us on every three or four years; he was a minister in the Methodist Church whose policy was to keep its employees on the move. Thus I learnt that life was about moving on; about packing up, saying good bye, meeting new experiences and endlessly moving on.

Theatre was my passion from childhood on and remained so until full time parenting took me over. The theatre life suited me just fine; always on the move, changing towns and theatres, roles and work mates. The butterfly’s wings were clipped with motherhood though; no more going where the wind blew.

In the first year of marriage, I trained as a Natural Beauty Therapist, an absorbing experience which opened the door to many alternative realities - natural diet, astrology, acupuncture and energy flow, Ayurvedic body types, palmistry, reincarnation, the Kabbalah and much more; it opened my eyes to a different world view and each of these delights I have followed up during my life.

It also gave a life of my own – as a masseuse; in Warwickshire when the Royal Shakespeare Company was in its Stratford-upon-Avon home, and in Fleet Street (an exhausting succession of beery, stressed journalists with stiff bodies) when it was in London. While loving the role of parent and frequently feeling fulfilled by it there were times of intense longing for theatre as the ultimate creative expression of my soul.

The birth of my first child, a daughter, catalysed a monumental inner crisis, through which I was led to a healing service in a Spiritualist Church and profoundly experienced my soul crying for recognition. I learnt of my purpose here as a woman dedicated to spirit. I was on the move spiritually.

Just after the birth of my second child, a son, I was initiated into Transcendental Meditation which was a life saver and kept me from breaking up under the pressure of two then three small children as a single parent most of the time as their father was wedded to the theatre. This opened the way to exploring my own way of spirituality which eventually took me away from the local C. of E. church in the village outside Stratford and through a time at the Spiritual Community Church of Rudolph Steiner until I was ready to let go and dive into my own limitless spirit.

Some of the most exciting times in my theatre life were the musicals and pantomimes primarily because of the dancing. I Charleston-ed in ‘The Boy Friend’, did top-hat-and-cane ‘high kicks’ in ‘Oh, What a Lovely War’, comic and sweet-young-thing routines in pantomime rep. (provincial repertory theatre), waltzed elegantly on Broadway in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s ‘All’s Well that Ends Well’, and danced full-bloodied rock in Trevor Nunn’s seminal ‘Winter’s Tale’ at Stratford, in Japan and Australia. High times, times when I felt fully alive.

Movement during the motherhood years was racing around keeping up with three small children but with no applause! Then, miraculously, when the smallest child was two, I found myself on a weekend of many kinds of dance; someone rubbed the jar and my creative genie popped out. During a two hour slot of something called ‘Sacred Dance’, I burst into life more fully than ever; this was what I had been waiting for all my life, without knowing it.

Four years ago in search of a simpler life close to the earth, my partner and I moved to a mountain in Spain! Now I am both an international Dance teacher, the other a Spanish peasant. They are dramatically different, in fact diametrically different but it suits someone born a dual ‘Gemini’ subject, and one day – the famous ‘mañana’ day – the two will come together, and dancers will come here to form a sacred dancing circle and soak up the peace and healing of these beautiful mountains.