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​Dawn Richard, New Orleans, and
Bodily Resurrection through Dance

springboards for reflection
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Dawn Richard on NPR:
Music and Interviews
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Excerpts from Lars Gotrich's Review
of ​the album Redemption
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Dancing in a Club, 
​lured by a Goddess

There was no room to move, yet the room moved. We found open spaces to jump and gyrate, enraptured not only by the pulsing future-club music, but also by its maker. Just before an ambitious run of gigs during SXSW, Dawn Richard — who records under the name D∆WN — was our body-music guru in a small Washington, D.C., venue. She sang hard, danced harder and partied hardest with an already-ecstatic crowd; she achieved goddess status from her radiant energy alone. But that's Dawn Richard's standard operating procedure: Take it all, and bring everyone with her.

-- Lars Gotrich, NPR, Review: D∆WN, 'Redemption'

• November 10, 20167:00 AM ET

​Redemption as Self-Celebration ​on the Dance Floor

"Whatever or whoever you are, be proud of it — that this would be our redemption. To go into this era hands up and heads high." That celebration exists not just in the rave-worthy cuts, but also in how Richard encourages open conversation about sex-positivity and consent (the glowstick anthem "Love Under Lights," featuring an outro that chops woozy vaporwave with street percussion), desire (the hyper, brassy "Renegades" and the slinky and string-laden, proggy slow jam "The Louvre") and the limitations of labels (the underwater Sade smoothness of "Sands").

-- Lars Gotrich, NPR, Review: D∆WN, 'Redemption'

• November 10, 20167:00 AM ET

​It's about Bodies
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In "LA," D∆WN reminds listeners that Redemption is about bodies. As the crunchy guitar gives way in its closing moments, Trombone Shorty offers a minute of ecstatic brass. In New Orleans, where Richard is from and Trombone Shorty is based, the second line is a Sunday ritual, a brass-band party in the streets after a wedding, a business opening — anything, but most significantly a funeral. It's a celebration of life, and here it's set against a body count: "We just want to know / If we really matter? / We just wanna know," she sings. If that D.C. crowd in March was any indication, those bodies are black, those bodies are LGBTQ, those bodies deserve to move and love — and D∆WN wants to lift them up, find allies and bring them all to the dance floor.

​-- Lars Gotrich, NPR, Review: D∆WN, 'Redemption'

• November 10, 20167:00 AM ET

​The Dance Floor as 
Sacred Community

a note on bodily resurrection


by Jay McDaniel, January 7, 2022

Life on the dance floor -- it’s all about the body, sex-positivity, desire, the limitation of labels, and the collective ecstasy of self-celebration through pulsating, danceable music.  So says Lars Gotrich of NPR in his review of Redemption,  Dawn, he says, is a a body music guru.  

And what is the religious significance of this?   Some say this kind of experience is a foretaste of what the Bible calls the bodily resurrection of the dead at the end of time.   It is noteworthy that this image of resurrection is in contrast to another image of life after death, namely that of a soul leaving the body and joining God in heaven.  The latter image is indebted to Greek and Platonic ways of thinking, which their sharp separation of soul and body.  The idea of bodily resurrection reflects the Hebraic idea that the human self is psychosomatic: that is, an embodied self.   These two images are in tension, and both are present in the biblical narratives.
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Admittedly most of us cannot quite picture a bodily resurrection at the end of time.   It seems fantastical and fabricated.  The imagination is further stretched if, as for so many, the body is cremated.  It can help if we think of the resurrected body as of a different order: a spiritual body with its unique energies, rather than a literal, physical body.  

Be that as it may, the idea of bodily resurrection naturally invites the question: Might we have a foretaste of such an experience even in this life?   And here contemporary club scenes offer a hint.  In these contexts people find “open spaces to jump and gyrate” – free from labels and free to say “yes” to the whole of life, including bodily life. 

Let it be noted that not everyone is included.  People with disabilities that prevent them from jumping and gyrating; people whose cultural and religious traditions emphasize modesty in dress and demeanor; people without the funds to afford entrance; people whose bodies are diseased or in pain, and for whom the body truly feels like a burden, perhaps even an enemy, rather than a friend. 

We can only hope that in the ultimate day of resurrection, where all bodies come forth, the divine unity in whose heart the universe unfolds – God – may be much more inclusive.   We can hope that heaven, however understood, is a more inclusive and creative dance floor, welcoming all.  

What is clear, however, is that for those who do participate, who let go and dance, there is a moment of ecstasy that transcends the tragedies and broken dimensions of life, at least for a moment, and that offers a taste of something beautiful and good and true, something divine in its own right.  And what is clear is that this happens through the body, not apart from it.  The ecstasy is bodily ecstasy.   

Of course the word ecstasy means standing outside something, and the question is: What is being transcended?  What is transcended is not the body itself, but rather the fear of the body, the rejection of the body, that has too often accompanied western (Greek and Christian influenced) cultural consciousness.  In the moment of freedom, the body reclaims its place in history and in consciousness as having agency of its own: that is, power and wisdom in its own right. 

In jumping and gyrating we learn from our bodies.  Something similar happens in various forms of bodily meditation.  See The Withness of the Body.

And how about the “self” that is celebrated in the dancing?  Is it transcended?  A straightforward answer might simply be No.   As Gotrich explains in discussing Dawn Richard, the self is affirmed, fully and completely, not negated. 

Still we can ask, what self is being affirmed?  The private, self-centered ego?  The relational self whose very existence partly depends on connections with others?  The divine self that dwells within each person?  There is no single answer to this, but we can rightly suppose that, at least for some, it is the frightened, self-negating self that is transcended, at least for a moment, so that a different and more beautiful self – the embodied self who is embraced by the deep Compassion, freely claims her space in the ultimate context, saying “I, too, am somebody,” no matter who thinks or treats me otherwise.  This is the fully empowered, relational self.

And where is God in all this?  Of course all depends on what is meant by God.  But if we think of God as embodied herself, then we might well say that God is on the dance floor, inside each self, as the beauty that finds itself in the moment of dancing.   This makes even more sense if we think panentheistically, recognizing that the universe itself is God’s body.  See Panentheism: The Universe as God’s Body.

In human life priests and ministers, rabbis and imams are people who help us find our way into the life of God.   Protestant Christians further affirm that everyone is a priest, each in his or her own way.  Gotrich speaks of Dawn Richard as a “Goddess.”  He is being metaphorical, but he is also saying that, in his experience of being guided by her energy at that small club in Washington DC, she played an extremely special, almost divine role.  In the language of open and relational (process) theology, her role was not coercive, but it was indeed persuasive.  People felt her energy and were lured into dancing, finding their own agency. 

​This is the very way God works in the world, so process thinkers believe.  We are lured by God to become fully ourselves, so that we can love our neighbors as ourselves and love ourselves as well as our neighbors.  This love is not abstract.  It is not simply “thinking nice thoughts” about others.  It is bodily and active, including touch and movement.  It is naturally expressed in politically engaged action aimed at helping bring about beloved communities where all people are empowered and included, and no one is left behind.  This expression needs its nourishment, its moments of contemplation and prayer, its moments of ecstasy where life is renewed and celebrated on its own terms and for its own sake.  Rabbi Bradley Artson puts it this way:

Joy for its own sake, laughter and conviviality without pretext, meeting time's advance with unapologetic delight, raucous noise, good friends — these are nothing less than the eruption of the hidden light cracking the conventional crust of our mature good sense, our dehumanizing obsession with control, our idolatrous reliance on possession as salvation. (Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson)

The dance floor operates in the same way. It provides a context for joy for its own sake: bodily joy. In the immediacy of the moment, if only for that moment, the body is resurrected for a new day, a new beginning, a moment of facing the wind with at least one hand, maybe two, waving free.

​-- Jay McDaniel