Professor Trance is coming to South Africa to teach us the healing power of trance dancing. SHAUN DE WAAL spoke to him
FRANK NATALE, otherwise known as Professor Trance, is not the first to note the echo of ancient ritual in today’s dance culture. Rock-concert-goers, clubbers and ravers are engaging in a collective activity not entirely unlike a pagan festival; they just do it without dogma or mumbojumbo.
Natale, however, draws the parallel explicitly. His reinvented shamanism encourages one to dance oneself into a state of trance, with the help of music based largely on drumming. The Santeria cult of Cuba, the practitioners of voodoo in Haiti, and many African societies (including the Bushmen) have been doing this for some time — a source of inspiration for Western musicians such as David Byrne.
Natale is the founder and president of the Natale Institute for Experiential Education, which runs seminars worldwide on trance dancing and drumming, as well as more conventional courses in communication, self-esteem and sexuality. The institute has branches and affiliated groups in 11 countries and recording studios in two of them. There, ”Energisers” hold workshops and rituals and make the music that propels them.
So how does trance dancing work? Natale told the Mail & Guardian that ”it’s really embarrassingly simple. You put a blindfold on, you do some conscious breathing, you put on the music, you start to move. And if you do this for about half an hour, allowing the rhythm to impact you, you access what we as shamans call the healing state of ecstasy.”
The idea is to evoke a waking dream state, in which your mind, freed of its egotistical restrictions, can solve mundane problems as well as more profound spiritual ones. Natale’s booklet, Trance Dance, which comes with a CD, Shaman’s Breath (Island), contains testimony from various people who have had life- changing experiences in this way. At the very least, says Natale, participants ”feel more turned on to life”.
”It’s vibration that puts people into trances,” he says, ”so when you send out a frequency from a drum it bounces off everything in its space, including human flesh … Let’s say your brain, your heart and your genitals vibrate at a different frequency. What happens when you’re dancing is that these three vibrations become entrained through the rhythm and you access a beyond-space-time dream state.
”There’s a recreational form [of trance dancing] that’s become popular in clubs,” notes Natale, ”where people take the drug Ecstasy for the same reason. But the kids that are on Ecstasy, their livers are like someone of 65.”
So Natale is promoting a natural way to reach the same frame of mind. Which is appropriate, as he was one of the founders of the worldwide Phoenix House network of drug-rehab communities, a field in which he worked for over a decade. But he left when his introduction of ”alternative methods” of healing met with disapproval, starting his own institute in 1979.
He scorns ”manmade chemicals” like Ecstasy and LSD, but has nothing against what he calls ”teacher plants” — organic substances like marijuana and ayahuasca. In fact, he positively recommends them. In Trance Dance, he writes: ”We believe that the denial and rejection of these plants is one of the main reasons our species has become so removed from the Great Mother’s intelligence.”
Natale’s shamanism seeks to reconnect humanity with the spiritual forces that Western civilisation tends to ignore. Aspects include the power of yoga-style breathing, the use of mystic masks, finding one’s spirit animal(s), rediscovering sacred sexuality, and the like.
Natale’s book may help you encounter this kind of shamanism solo. Trance Dance is no scholarly tome on the relation of percussion and religious ecstasy through the ages, but rather a cheery mix of self-improvement and New-Age mysticism.
The CD, Shaman’s Breath, came about when Natale and others were holding a ”full-moon ritual” in Miami Beach, Florida, and a fellow drummer turned out to be an A&R man from Island Records. Island took the basics of the Energisers’ drum music, added some fancy bits, and turned out a disc with a distinctly techno flavour. This was done in part deliberately, says Natale, in order to reach the raver market.
Shaman’s Breath is a very good listen in its own right, whether or not you trance dance to it. The flow of intersecting rhythms builds enjoyably, and the hints of African, South American and Asian beats add spice. It is also relatively easy to disregard the occasional chanted exhortations (”Breathe, breathe … Become the goddess”), which can be annoying if you’re not in a cosmos-embracing mood.
Frank Natale will do a workshop at the Omega Centre in Johannesburg — phone (011) 705-2654 — on September 22, and will participate in a rave at Ravenation 3 Rave City in Cape Town on September 23