Rolando Toro Araneda

Rolando Toro Araneda, creator of the Biodanza System, was an educator, psychologist, anthropologist, poet and painter.

Born in Concepción (Chile) on April 19, 1924 and, died on February 16, 2010 in Santiago, Chile, Professor Toro held the chair of psychology of Art and Expression at the Institute of Aesthetics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. He was a lecturer at the Centre for Medical Anthropology of the School of Medicine of the University of Chile. As a lecturer at the Centre for Medical Anthropology, he has carried out research on “Expressions of the unconscious“, “Art of the origins” and on the states of the “Expansion of Consciousness“. He was also nominated Professor Emeritus of the Inter-American Open University of Buenos Aires (Argentina).

Rolando Toro, when he was still young, was part of the Research Institute of the Psychiatric Hospital of Santiago where he experimented with different techniques with the patients with the aim of “humanizing medicine”; he introduced exercises with music and dance, and from his observations on patients he was able to ascertain the induction of different perceptions of the body and self-consciousness. These early experiences constituted the basis for the construction of the Theoretical Model of the discipline that was slowly taking a concrete form of operation. In 1970 Rolando Toro was asked to create the first chair of “Psychodanza”, the first denomination he had given to the method he was creating. This concept however involved a schism: the prefix “psyche” derives from the Greek psyché, which means “soul”, so the Psychodanza would have been “the dance of the soul”. Instead, it was necessary to re-establish the original concept of dance, which included the totality and unity of the individual in their vital movement. Starting from this reflection, in 1976 Professor Toro decided to call the method he had devised “Biodanza”: the prefix “Bio”, derived from Greek, means “life”. The primordial meaning of the word “dance” is “natural movement”, connected to emotion and rich in meaning. Hence the term “Biodanza” as “dance of life”.

Rolando Toro Araneda drew his inspiration from anthropological and ethological sources. Professor Toro created the first experiences that gave rise to Biodanza in the 1950s, following research on the combined effects of music and movement on well-being and lifestyle. For over sixty years, starting from his research in the field of medical anthropology, he carried out studies in different areas of knowledge in order to give this “discipline” a practical coherence that is based on solid theoretical foundations also drawn from biology in general and, in particular, from ethology and neurophysiology.