Sharing The Great Dance

An Interview with Cynthia Winton-Henry on The Great Dance

BY EMMALY WIEDERHOLT; IMAGES BY RUTH SCHOWALTER

Cynthia Winton-Henry is a co-founder of InterPlay as well as a philosopher, author, teacher, and performer based in California. She is currently working on a book project entitled The Great Dance with collaborators Marla Durden and Ruth Schowalter. Here, Cynthia describes the poem that is the impetus behind the book project, how the book will include a curriculum and materials to support educators, artists, and families, and why a vision of The Great Dance is needed now more than ever.

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Can you first tell me a little about what shaped you as an artist?

I was one of those kids people looked at and said, “She’s a dancer.” When it was time for college, I chose UCLA, where I could study dance. I fell in love with improvisation and choreographing in the moment. At the same time, I wanted to understand the role of body, soul, energy, spirit, and our bigger connections. That led me to join a summer program in Africa, where I experienced the complexity of The Great Dance in my white culture alongside African and African American companions. After college, I learned about a seminary in Berkeley that included dance. That’s where I began investigating what happened to dance in Christianity. Exploring my devotion to dance and how it happens all over the planet, I joined a company called Body and Soul and then created an improv practice called InterPlay with my colleague Phil Porter. It incorporates the creativity of movement, voice, stories, and stillness. Our practice also gave rise to a set of principles about body wisdom.

What was the impetus behind The Great Dance book project?

After decades of wandering around in the beautiful, hard wilderness of art, religion, politics, and what’s happening with the earth, I wanted to share what I’d learned in a form I could give my daughter and nieces. The Great Dance is my cosmology. I’m so happy it came out in a poem.

It draws from Ruth St. Denis, the modern dance pioneer who was Martha Graham’s teacher. It was her call to the divine dance as our primary vehicle for belovedness, caring, and connection that ignited my own. I think of The Great Dance as a love poem to this amazing dance we’re all in.

It felt important to publish The Great Dance for two reasons. At 70, I’m at the end of a significant arc of my work. Also, with Trump’s reelection as president, I wanted to give children and adults a stream of images and a story that celebrates the energy and diversity born of the dance that carries us all. Thankfully, I have enthusiastic InterPlay collaborators in Marla Durden, an Indigenous woman and beautiful graphic designer who designed my book, The Art of Ensoulment: How to Create from Body and Soul, and illustrator Ruth Schowalter, a dear collaborator, visionary folk artist, and an accomplished educator. Together, they hope to create a curriculum for artists and educators who want to offer the poem in community events and classrooms.

Marla and Ruth are passionate about the project, and their energy is really moving the project forward.

How are they building a curriculum and materials to support educators, artists, and families?

We plan to include suggestions using InterPlay. For instance, a part of the poem could involve people walking, running, and freezing in beautiful shapes. Or you might have kids and adults play with shape and stillness. A curriculum will highlight easy movement forms so people can see what is possible. Hopefully, people will use their own creativity!  It’s not an intellectual curriculum about the poem, but suggestions for bringing it to life.

The approach won’t require pliés and tendus or any technique, but if you have a technique, so much the better. The performance of the poem could allow a cross-section of movement. I also think that open-ended improvisation is perfect for The Great Dance since it will enable people in wheelchairs and with varied levels of access to participate.

Is there anything more about Marla and Ruth you want to share?

Both are InterPlay leaders with lots of practice and history with the Art of Ensoulment. They both explore ways that diverse people embody soul and affirm what I call the you of you and the me of me. They are also brilliant teachers and presenters.

What is your timeline, and where can readers get it if they are interested?

We’re looking at a 2026 publication. It will be a full-color art book available on platforms like Amazon.

We plan to use some of the proceeds to support children’s dance centers.

Why is this book needed now?

People in the US, particularly, and probably people all over the world, have been impacted by ways of thinking that split body, mind, heart, and spirit, that denigrate dance, and that don’t see dance as a wisdom practice. We’re in a time of recovery from these painful legacies. What is being perpetrated by our government targets words like “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” Exclusion impacts real people with real bodies.

The Great Dance celebrates this beautiful physical realm we’re living in. The middle of the poem points to each dancer’s sacred dance. “Yours is no ordinary dance… No one can really dance your Dance.” It’s a poetic way of saying every being is sacred. It’s a return to the cosmologies of Indigenous understanding but without any specific deification.

What do you hope readers of The Great Dance take away?

The desire to dance. And to listen. For me, this isn’t a metaphor. I know people will read it as a metaphor, but to me, it’s the physics of sacred movement, time, energy, space, beauty.

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Support The Great Dance book project here.

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The Great Dance

by Cynthia Winton-Henry

 

In the beginning

was the Great Dance.

And in this Dance

was the energy of life

contracting, expanding,

contracting, expanding,

creating millions of ways

to move and be moved.

 

The Great Dance was a dance so great

and far and wide

that whole planets and stars and solar systems

joined in twirling and spinning

 

and circling round.

 

From this whirling circle,

Earth Spirit moved

as did her trees and mountains

and rivers and beasts

and even the smallest of things,

the insects,

each and every thing

moving and changing and dancing

their own splendid Dance.

 

And each Dance was a sacred dance–

the flowing dances, the jagged dances,

jumpy dances and smooth ones,

some dances just as fast as a wink

and some as slow as the night is long.

Of course, there were many, many

falling down and getting up dances.

And some dances were quiet so long

you might mistake them for nondances.

 

And did you know that

even before your birth

in your mother’s womb

the Dance came alive

in your skin and breath and bone

’til you too became part of the Great Dance.

 

But yours is no ordinary dance.

In all the world, no two dances are alike.

One beetle’s Dance is different from his brother’s.

And North Wind’s Dance?

It cannot be compared to Sister South Wind’s.

Each Dance is like no other

and this is why it is sacred.

No one can really dance your Dance.

It is sacred.

 

Earth Spirit’s power depends

on each sacred Dance.

Without you, the Great Dance dwindles,

grows dull.

 

But!

When everything

joins in the Great Dance

AMAZING! GLORIOUS! ASTONISHING!

Grace, energy, and life abound

just from each dancer

doing their own joyous Dance!

 

Today, like every day,

The Great Dance

needs you

and all of creation,

all planets, stars,

trees and mountains and beasts,

oceans and deserts,

insects and humans

to join in the Dance.

 

Listen to your bodyspirit and

You can hear the Great Dance singing,

“Dance!

 

Dance each morning

and dance each day.

And at night,

I will dance in your dreams.

For we are the Dance!

I dance in you,

You dance in me,

the Dance that is forever.

 

Bless you, my dancing one.

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