Rhythm Sanctuary

The room at Sons of Italy in Wheat Ridge quiets to bare feet. The overhead lights dim. An altar has been built at one edge of the floor — cloth, candle, some object of the season — and the dancers arrive in silence, letting the space ask its first question of them. No phones. No shoes. No talking. No scent. Whatever came in on your skin from the day, you leave at the door with your jacket. What remains is a body, and a rhythm that has already started without you.

Then the wave begins. Slow at first — a single pulse to enter through, feet finding the floor. The music deepens, opens, cracks. The room tips into a current nobody is steering. Staccato sharpens the edges; chaos scatters them. Somewhere in there, lyrical lifts, and you realize you have been moving without deciding to move for some minutes now. At the end, stillness. Not the absence of motion — the presence of something that was here the whole time. The DJ pulls the last thread gently. People sit, or lie, or kneel at the altar. No one applauds. The closing ritual holds the silence open long enough that you cannot pretend the dance was nothing.

Rhythm Sanctuary calls this "a safe, drug and alcohol free, sacred and 'Altared Space' where community gathers into the arms of the Great Mystery to dance and be danced." That sentence is the whole theology of the room.

It began in 2005 in a living room in Boulder. Shannon Lei Gill had just finished her degree in Dance, Movement Music & Art Therapy from Naropa, and she felt the pull to bring people together and move. So she opened her door. First the living room, then a larger space, and in 2006 the 5,000-square-foot Avalon Ballroom, which she and a small team took on weekly. A Denver Sunday dance formed in 2007 and grew to two hundred and fifty strong. By the time it was done being the first of its kind in Colorado, it had already been that for years. "Where current culture and ancient wisdom come together through the practice of ecstatic dance and conscious music" — the frame she named early is the frame still carried now.

The lineage is Gabrielle Roth's — the wave, the five rhythms of flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, stillness, the practice of improvised movement as a way into the body and out of the mind. Shannon adopted the wave format from the emerging ecstatic dance movement and built the post-dance ritual practice around it. That ritual — the altar, the silence, the held closing — is what distinguishes Rhythm Sanctuary from a dance floor. It is what makes the room a sanctuary and not a room.

The weekly rhythm is Thursday, seven to nine-thirty. First Thursday of the month is Family Night; children dance free. Sliding scale twelve to twenty-five. The three guidelines on the door read like a vow: barefoot, silent, as you are. DJs rotate — James Barry, Steven Newman, Chris Cox, Malahakam, Miraja, Solomon. On January 2, 2020, Liquid Bloom (Amani Friend) played the floor, and the set was recorded and has been listened to by people who were never in the room.

What the community holds dear is visible in what it refuses. No performance. No instruction. No selling. No talking during the wave. The invitation is to arrive, move, be moved, and leave quieter than you came. "ALL WHO ENTER ARE WELCOME" is the only policy that matters once the music starts. A dancer's words stayed with Shannon: "This is exactly what we need! To feel ALIVE AGAIN in a united faith of what is to come!" — a faith that lives in embodied prayer, shared silence, community in motion, none of which require belief.

We are a small networked community that has encountered Rhythm Sanctuary as one of many threads still being woven through this part of Colorado. They have been holding this floor for twenty years. Meeting them was a gift to us, and the node is simply a way of remembering that the wave was already there.