In his personal experience – he wrote – many forces manifested within him to finally lead him to the creation of this “mix of art, science and love”.
Rolando felt “the possibility of pure contact with living reality through movement, gestures and the expression of feelings. Music as a universal language, the only language that everyone could understand in the Tower of Babel of the world; dance was the ideal form to integrate body and soul, and could communicate happiness, tenderness and strength to all the participants. And I wanted to share this all with a large number of people“.
He proposed an initiative of forming small groups to meet and dance and sing. And this is how Biodanza began, as “a way of living with beauty”.
Further research carried out with psychiatric patients allowed him to structure a theoretical model, which made it possible to operate within a wide range of organic responses and new behaviours.
“I found that during the dances universal models of expression in relation to different emotions appeared. So then I could give a structure to my work / to the system that was being created in which music, movement and emotion formed a perfect unity “.
At that time he worked at the Centre for Medical Anthropology at the School of Medicine of the University of Chile, directed by Francisco Hoffman.
“Our concern was to try different techniques of development in order to ‘humanize medicine’: group psychotherapies following Carl Rogers’ thought, art therapy (painting, theatre), music therapy, dance therapy and psychodrama“.
Within this research project he proposed dance meetings with patients interned in the University’s psychiatric hospital.
In 1970, there was a proposal to create a chair of Psychodance, the first denomination he had given to his system, at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, where he was Professor of Expression Psychology. Regarding the name, he stated that “A new-born discipline was created, for which the appropriate term did not exist“. He first employed the concept of Psychodance, but later found that it was not an interdisciplinary approach that would have a priori linked dance to psychological, anthropological or philosophical contents. Furthermore, the term Psychodance had the serious defect of a schism between body and soul. The prefix ‘psycho’ derives from the Greek psychè, which means soul, so Psychodanza would have been the ‘dance of the soul’. Instead, it was necessary to “re-establish the original concept of dance in its widest sense: as a movement of life, which could not be assimilated either to ballet or to another form of structured dance, nor could it be assimilated to a particular form of psychotherapy“. Starting from this reflection, in 1976, Rolando decided to call the system he had created Biodanza: “the prefix ‘bio’ derives from the Greek bios, which means ‘life’. The primordial meaning of the word ‘dance’ is ‘natural movement’, connected to emotion and full of meanings. The metaphor was formulated: ‘Biodanza, the dance of life’ “.
Definition
Rolando Toro Araneda liked to call Biodanza “the poetic of the human encounter” but considered it essential also to define it from an academic point of view.
The academic definition of Biodanza
“Biodanza is a system of human integration, of organic renewal, of emotional re-education and of re-learning the original functions of life. The development of human genetic potentials in an emotionally integrated group context stimulates the courage and joy of life “.
Last update to the definition
Rolando Toro Araneda made the last update to the definition of Biodanza in 2009. He passed away the following year, in February:
Biodanza is a system of acceleration of the processes of integration at the cellular, immune, metabolic, neuro-endocrine, cortical and existential levels through vivencia induced in an environment enriched by music, dance, contact, caress and the presence of the group.
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