Dance Freedom (For Only Six Bucks)

The music is blasting, the lights are dimmed and on the dance floor the bodies are dancing to a beat all their own.

A group of eight people is huddled around one another, slowly waving their arms in the air to create an undulating wave of flesh as they push against one another and move within the knot of people. A woman and a man step forward and backward as if they were waltzing, but flap their arms and bend at the waist almost like chickens pecking at seeds.

It's Wednesday night in the First Congregation Church located at 11 Garden St., and Dance Freedom is officially underway.

Approximately 50 middleaged men and women have gathered to express themselves through freestyle dance.

"What we're doing," whispers Litty Medalia, a member of the event's coordinating committee which collects the six dollar entrance fee, "is using the universal languages of dance and music to create a ritual."

"You can dance alone or in a group depending on the rise and flow of the music's energy. It's all just a chapter of the dance," she continues. "Dance Freedom is complete freedom to follow your energy and move however you like."

On the floor, the "dancers" evince the truth of her statement, as a group of three men start moving around one another, switching between sitting, standing and kneeling positions while always maintaining contact with at least one part of the other two's bodies.

Another woman begins to leap like a ballerina around the room's centerpiece--a tall red paper-mache pyramid covered with candles which provide the room its only light.

In a corner of the hall, a man kicks out at the windows in a manner mixing the best of Bruce Lee and Michael Flatley. In the meantime, one of the three men has elevated another in the air with his feet Superman-style.

"Dance Freedom started over 30 years ago," Medalia continues. "We were the world's original organization, and since then it's evolved into an internationally replicated event."

Neige Christenson, another coordinating committee member, calls the Wednesday night gatherings "a total healing experience after being a lawyer or doctor all week" describing the group as "a kind of family to return to and celebrate being alive in our bodies."

"It's not just a dance party," Christenson explains, "it's a social community as well, in which some dancers come back every week to see their friends and meet new ones."

Schlomit Auciello is one such dancer who has moved away from the event and now lives in Maine. "I met my husband here," she says. "Now we schedule our business trips around Wednesdays so that we can be here. I've been away from the community for 11 years, and I return as much as I can," she says to a chorus of "That's right!" from the other dancers gathered around her.

"This isn't a pickup scene," Christenson says, as an old man in purple sweatpants begins swaying back and forth with an attractive brunette. "It's a safe environment to just enjoy other people's company and the pleasantness of the dance."

Indeed, the night's attendees all act like family members, calling each other by names and hugging hello. A half-hour break in the evening of dances features announcements for storytelling groups in dancer's homes, backrubs accompanied by freestyle poetry, and a birthday cake in honor of any Scorpio's in the audience.

"Dance Freedom is for anyone who's ever instinctively moved to music in ways that most people would make fun of, and call bad dancing," Auciello explains. "Everyone is free to just move the way they like to. There's no embarrassment in dancing how you want to."