Dancing Deep Time: Embodying the Great Dance

BY RUTH SCHOWALTER (also known as Hallelujah Truth)

In the beginning

was the Great Dance.

And in this dance

was the energy of life…

Excerpts from the poem The Great Dance by Cynthia Winton-Henry. Artwork by Hallelujah Truth.

Note: This article was published in Stance on Dance’s Spring/Summer 2026 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

Entering The Great Dance

In 2025, I was asked to create artwork for Cynthia Winton-Henry’s intergenerational children’s book, The Great Dance. The phrase, “The Great Dance,” names a reality I have come to trust: the universe dances perpetually, and so do we. Life is always uplifting and downshifting, contracting and expanding, creating and recreating itself. Long before I understood myself as a dancer, I was already participating in this dance through my connection to nature.

A recent walk in a nearby park illustrates the way I experience life’s great dance. While I was strolling, I stopped to absorb my environment and the greenery before me. In stillness, the trees, shrubs, grasses, and the winding creek became one percolating mosaic of energy — one pulsating life. Awed and slightly dizzy, I breathed in this reality. Then the vision vanished. It is in moments like these that the visual art I make aligns with the way I receive Earth’s energy. The lines, dots, shapes, and colors in my visual work express my ongoing engagement with what I can now call The Great Dance.

Growing Up in An Anti-Dance World

“We have no rhythm.” That sentence explained why my military family did not dance. Instead, we marched to orders. We underwent my father’s inspections for bed making, car washing, and other household duties. I helped serve dinner at 6:15 p.m. every night, no earlier, no later. None of our individual needs were considered.

To learn social graces and etiquette, my 12-year-old body was enrolled in cotillion. For two years, I was pushed across a ballroom floor with a boy’s hand pressing my back, guiding me. I was taught to cross my legs at my ankles and to place my hands demurely in my lap.

In 1972, we moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, the largest military reservation in the United States, and I learned that my 14-year-old female body was no longer safe. I could not comfortably ride my bike alone or venture into the woods. As my body shifted from child to young woman, wolf whistles followed me everywhere. Young men with shaved heads traveled in packs across the base, training to jump out of airplanes or become rangers. My body, constantly under surveillance, did not feel like my own.

The Vietnam War was ongoing. Our windows rattled from artillery practice. Inside, there was no contemporary music; no Beatles or rock’n’roll was allowed in our home. There was no dancing. At school, teenage boys nicknamed me “Too-tall Schowalter.” At 5 foot 10, I felt out of proportion and out of place. Their diminishing gaze kept me from attending school dances. Again and again, I learned to keep my body from dancing.

My parents, with good intentions, continued to train me. I was instructed to sit up straight, make eye contact, and smile while speaking. My mother urged me to walk with my head held high, as if balancing a book while receiving first place in the Miss America competition. Unpleasant emotions were not welcome. The message was to be agreeable and ready to serve.

It was no surprise that when I graduated from high school and left the military base, I thought nothing of attending Pepperdine University, a Church of Christ school, which in the 1970s prohibited dancing. If caught, a student could be suspended or expelled. No dancing allowed. No problem. I had no rhythm.

Dancing with Earth in Deep Time

In 2004, when I was 46, I married an ecstatic paleontologist, someone who reads animal behavior written into stone hundreds of millions of years ago. Together, we have walked ancient landscapes across North and South America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. In these places, I have experienced the unbroken lineage of life. I have felt expanded across time — before Earth formed, before oceans breathed, before oxygen made complex life possible. I have known the waters from which we came and the joy of legs moving on land, fins disappearing, bodies leaping into flight.

I have come to understand that I am bone and flesh of Earth. I am mother dinosaur and first bird. I am the White Cliffs of Dover watching the sea, my eroding body releasing skeletons of life sleeping for millions of years. Deep Time is not abstract for me; it has become embodied knowledge. It dances through me.

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 the Dance.

When I Began Dancing

I was in my 50s when I began discovering the “me of me” through improvisational dance. I have always loved being a body in motion: running, playing tennis, powering through landscapes on my feet and on bicycles. Strength and endurance from these physical activities gave me confidence in my body, but failed to offer me freedom, ease, and a more personal expression of soul.

I began my improvisational dance journey with the Dancing Flowers for Peace, a dance troupe for women 50 and older, which offered me ways to move authentically in my aging body. The Atlanta 5Rhythms® community opened ways for me to experience my spirit through a wide range of movement. Then I found InterPlay, an improvisational system that includes individual and group movement, inviting everyone to a fuller sense of self.

Crackle, sizzle… these were the sounds of my soul dancing on stage under a spotlight, witnessed by a small audience during a performance I did with Atlanta Soulprint Players, an InterPlay performance group that I’m part of. My body, mind, and spirit felt like sparklers, sending out the light of my being.

Improvisational dance shifted something fundamental for me. It freed me to dance anywhere. More importantly, it transformed the warrior-soldier I needed to be to survive in male-dominated environments. The behaviors I relied on — the contest of wills, the charging forward, leaping into battle — softened and transformed one dance at a time.

I began dancing outdoors — in canyons, cliffs, and deserts across the United States and around the world — connecting to Earth in a new way. Ancient fragrances rose from layered sediments. I sensed the continuity of life stretching back through deep time. Bone of Earth. Sinew of tree roots. Fire at the core of Earth’s being. These natural forces taught me another way to dance. I might be atoms leaping, spinning, forming molecules and DNA. I am life swirling into form. In each dance, my anger loosened. Love entered. Warrior no longer, I became a dancer.

AMAZING! GLORIOUS! ASTONISHING!

Grace, energy, and life abound

just from each dancer

doing their own joyous dance!

Dancing with Cynthia Winton-Henry

I met Cynthia Winton-Henry, co-founder of InterPlay, during a 2013 course I took with her in Atlanta, on the path to becoming a certified InterPlay leader. Something in me recognized her immediately — not just her mastery as a lifetime dancer and improvisational performer but also the depth of listening and love that moved through her work. Afterward, I made a conscious decision to attend her Monday night dance chapels, to her steady invitation to pray with the body, to her unfolding inquiry into embodied soul that became The Art of Ensoulment, her most recent book. For more than a decade now, I have danced my prayers alongside her, nourished by her brilliance, her fierce generosity, and her unwavering faith in what people can become when they are truly witnessed. For six years, I have led my own weekly dance chapel, carrying this lineage with gratitude and care. I am a dance chaplain — still amazed, still devoted.

Illuminating The Great Dance

Over the years, Cynthia has leaned into my art. She sees me — and she sees my images. When she envisioned images for The Great Dance, she recognized and called forward my long relationship with visual language and the way I listen through images. My image-making is rooted in a daily creative practice shaped over decades. I was a child who saw images when I closed my eyes and followed their movement. Writing came early, then poetry, and later painting, as dream imagery asked for form beyond words. Influenced by Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, I learned to show up daily to the page, to meditation, and mark-making to receive information from the subconscious and give it shape. This ongoing practice is the ground from which my work for The Great Dance arises.

I sign all my art “Hallelujah Truth.” I place my name, Ruth, inside Truth. My work arises from the magic of claiming my voice, my truth, and celebrating it with a “hallelujah.” Through The Great Dance, I lend my art and my name as a blessing, inviting children and all who are listening to their souls to celebrate their uniqueness and to trust the sacred stories moving through them.

Each dance is like no other

and this is why it is sacred.

No one can really dance your Dance.

It is sacred.

The Great Dance, The Book, A Seed of a Movement

In addition to inviting my visual work to accompany her poem, The Great Dance, Cynthia invited visionary graphic designer and creative alchemist Marla Durden, an Indigenous woman whose grounding in the Earth and attunement to the unseen have been essential to bringing The Great Dance into book form. Marla’s artistry holds both precision and mysticism, translating movement, time, and embodied wisdom into a visual language that can be held, read, and returned to. More than a designer, Marla has been a steady force of coherence and devotion, guiding the project to take shape with integrity, beauty, and deep respect for the living dance it seeks to serve.

What is The Great Dance to others? The three of us — Cynthia, Marla, and I — hope to plant the seed of a movement, one that celebrates each person’s authentic expression and inherent worth. Rooted in the philosophy of InterPlay, The Great Dance book brings together poetry and imagery to express the sacredness of every living being, the Earth, and the cosmos. We have also envisioned a curriculum for children and adults that supports dances, poems, artmaking, and community performances that awaken more of us to our creative birthrights, our ancestors, and a future full of joyful integrity.

My Great Dance, My Becoming

Creating images for The Great Dance has deepened my relationship with dance. It has asked me to listen with my whole body to movement, to memory, to something larger than my own ideas, and to trust what wants to come through image. This process has braided together decades of daily practice, teaching, dreaming, and moving, reminding me that image-making is not separate from dance but another way the body thinks and prays. Working on The Great Dance has reaffirmed for me that creativity is relational: a conversation between inner seeing and outer invitation, between discipline and mystery. It has been a quiet affirmation in the ongoing choreography of becoming.

Invitation to The Great Dance

You are invited to The Great Dance. Join us. Step into wonder. Bow to the sacred in one another. And remember that we are all part of something vast, holy, and beautifully alive.

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. 

~~

To learn more, visit www.gofundme.com/f/support-the-great-dance.

Ruth Schowalter taught at the Language Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology for 25 years, integrating InterPlay for 10 of those years to support embodied English communication for international students from beginning to advanced. She invited learners out from behind their desks into movement and story, crossing geographic and linguistic borders while cultivating communities of connection and friendship. In 2018, she co-founded the nonprofit InterPlay Sustaining International Sisters (SIS) with a former student and Turkish Visiting Scholar, bringing women together across cultural, generational, racial, linguistic, and faith differences in metro Atlanta. Learn more at www.sislife.org.

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