What is Biodanza?
Toro: The word Biodanza has two parts, bios (life) and danza (meaningful movement). So Biodanza is the possibility of dancing our own lives, of bringing music, rhythm, harmony and emotion into our personal and community lives. Biodanza is different from conventional dance because it's a guided discipline that stimulates specific aspects of the person, such as creativity, affection, vitality; and we have selected sets of movement to music exercises that stimulate those universal functions of each human being.
Can we define Biodanza as a therapy?
Toro: It depends on the concept one has of therapy. The therapy done by psychologists, for example, is not Biodanza. However, we're doing therapy every time we're putting something positive in human beings, like for example increasing health. The teacher who encourages her students when they show her their drawings is doing therapy, but in a general sense.
As regards its origins, Biodanza started in Chile, where I was born, 40 years ago. The factors that drove me to create biodanza are many but can be synthetised in two. First, my own concerns regarding what was happening at the time. The WWII, massive destruction of large populations, the atomic bomb, the bombing of undefended towns, countless killed during the holocaust, the unbelievably perverse behaviour of human beings. On the other hand, I was also experiencing wonderful things, like love, connection with nature, the beauty of the sea, experiences which we could call paradisiacal. These two aspects, one terribly destructive, the other incredibly constructive, presented a metaphysical conflict. So I thought I needed to find a universal language, and that language was music, because music is understood by all human beings. From the very start of this new discipline it was very important to incorporate the body and to ensure that body and spirit formed a unit because of the long tradition of cultural dissociation. So I thought of selecting exercises with very specific effects. From tai chi I took fluidity, which is one of the characteristics of movement, and fluidity dances became one of Biodanza's 500 exercises.