Conscious Dance and Freedom

When "Be Yourself" Doesn't Apply to Certain People

A quick survey through posts promoting conscious dance events (mostly Ecstatic Dance) reveals a few common themes. One regular dance says, “We hold a barefoot, sober, and consent based space to support the healing potential of the full freedom of expression.” Another says, “All are welcome in this judgement free space,” and “Movement is FREEDOM. Come liberate yourself!” Another event says, “Give yourself permission to move how you want to move and feel what there is to feel.” The general guidelines for these dances as posted on the website ecstaticdance.org are as follows: 1. We Dance Without Shoes; 2. We Dance Without Words; and 3. We Dance as We Are. Each of these guidelines has explanations beneath it. The explanation under number three is, “No Drugs/Alcohol, No Phones, No Camera/Video, No Scents, No Expectations, No Judgements, No Shoulds, No Oughts… Just Be Yourself; With Respect for Ourselves, the Space, and One Another.”

Most of these statements are disingenuous. “Be yourself” only applies to certain people. “Full freedom of expression” is not so full. Judgements abound in these “judgement free” spaces. I tested all of these, not intentionally but by being, or trying to be, myself. I am a nudist, and I am a professional nude model for drawing and painting classes.

I went to a few dances and kept my clothes on throughout, but I could never get the thought out of my head that this would be so much better if I could ditch my clothes. So I asked different dance event organizers if I could dance in my preferred state of undress. With very few exceptions, the answer has been an emphatic no. “Just be yourself” does not apply to nudists. A nudist who lost his or her clothes on the dance floor would face the judgement in the judgement free space of being ejected from the event. Less than a day after denying my request to dance in my pure state, one dance group posted on Instagram that they were “facilitators of unbridled expression”. Only if you keep the bridle on, I thought to myself with a bit of sarcasm.

The one regular event that has agreed to my request to dance as my pure self is the once-a-year Dragonfly Festival. I’ve attended three times, and each year it was important to me to be viewed as just a regular guy (respectful of others, cognizant of issues regarding consent and contact, especially on the dance floor), just without the artificial additives of clothing. For the 2025 festival, I was selected to lead a workshop which makes me feel that I have been accepted into the tribe. I love Dragonfly Fest and its organizer Al Jameson for its acceptance of me as I am. The only negative is that Dragonfly Fest only occurs once a year. A video of one of the Dragonfly Ecstatic Dances is below…

A few months ago, I came across the social media accounts and website of Unleash Movement, and it looked to be exactly what I was looking for. It had started in California as a festival retreat not unlike Dragonfly. The FAQ on the site listed “full nudity” high among the list of the things that one may encounter at an Unleash festival retreat. The organizer of Unleash!, Yarixa Ferrao, had recently moved to Austin, which was about a three hour drive from my house, and was starting to put on events there. I was unable to attend the first one of these in October 2024, a four-hour event called Unleash! The Resurrection. The Unleash! Instagram page featured the following post from that event.

FINALLY, I thought, a somewhat regularly occurring dance event where I can be myself. I kept Unleash! on my radar, waiting for one that would fit with my schedule (keeping in mind that I also had a six hour round-trip drive). They had two or three Unleashed Hour events February-April 2025 (although each one was actually two hours in duration), but I had art modeling gigs each of those days.

Another Unleashed Hour event was announced for April 29th. I checked my schedule, saw that I was free to go to this one, and bought a ticket. I then sent Yarixa a DM telling her how excited I was to have found a dance event where I could be myself (silly me). She then wrote back and told me that there was no full nudity at this event but that people could only remove their tops. Of course, the photo release, the legal contract that everyone buying a ticket to the event must agree to, stated that the event was clothing optional. When I asked her about this and pointed out wording in the release, she said that she had decided to enact this new policy because it was a shorter two-hour container. I told her that I no longer wanted to make the drive all the way to Austin for an event where I was not free to be myself, so she refunded my ticket purchase. She also said that she would change the wording of the release. That “clothing optional” wording was still in the photo release the day of the event and on the ticket purchase page for the next Unleashed Hour event in May (which I did not attend).

Yarixa recently announced a new Unleashed Hour event for July 19th, this one a three and a half hour one. She’d told me that she had forbidden full nudity at the April event specifically because of the shorter two-hour container, so, I hoped, perhaps this longer one would be different. When she posted that the early bird tickets were now on-sale, I posted a public comment to point out a problem with the page. At that point, I didn’t know if I’d even be available to attend. She fixed the issue I’d pointed out, but she also sent me a DM reminding me that, as we had discussed in April, full nudity was still prohibited. The photo release contract still stated that the event is clothing optional. Shorts or bottoms are clothing and if they are mandatory, then clothing was not “optional”. I told her I wouldn’t attend if that was the case, and she said (again) that she would change the wording of the photo release (as of this writing, it has still not been changed).

It is disappointing that people who claim to facilitate freedom are so afraid of it. As a nudist living in a textile world, I don’t try to go nude at random functions like bowling or skating (although I have done both nude at special naturist events) but bowling alleys and skating rinks don’t use the rhetoric that conscious dance does, promising “full freedom of expression”, “be yourself”, etc. Is it too much to ask that these conscious dance events mean the words that they say, and that if they don’t mean them, then don’t say them?

Most people, organizers and participants, assume by default that these dance events are clothing mandatory unless they state that they are clothing optional. From the rhetoric used by and about these dances, it should be the other way around; they should be clothing optional unless stated that they are clothing mandatory. There are only a few regular dance events in the world that are tagged as clothing optional, but only one of those is anywhere near me. And, as it turns out, the organizer of that one tells me that it is not really clothing optional (at least not when the nude model/nudist activist plans on or thinks about attending). It’s sad.