Origin
Rolando Toro Araneda, a clinical psychologist and anthropologist from Chile, developed the Biodanza System. In 1965, he held the chair of Expressive Arts at the Pontifical University of Chile, Institute of Aesthetics, and was teaching at the Center for Anthropological Medical Studies of the Medical School at the University of Chile.
In the Psychiatric Hospital of Santiago, he began investigating the effect of music and dance on psychiatric patients. The Center for Medical and Anthropological Studies, led by Professor Francisco Hoffman had the mission of evaluating diverse techniques of psychotherapy to humanize medicine: Psychotherapy in line with Carl Roger's person-centered approach, art therapy, psychodrama, Gestalt, music therapy, and others.
Toro's approach included physical activity and the stimulation of emotions with dance and human encounters. He began with harmonious and slow dances with closed eyes to induce harmony and quietness. The observation revealed that these exercises had the opposite effect: They easily induced inward states in patients. In these cases, the hallucinations and deliriums accentuated and could last many days.
Without doubt, the patients who by definition had a poorly integrated identity, dissociated more under the influence of movements that induced an inward state. This apparently negative result suggested a strong mobilization of the unconscious. In following sessions, he introduced keyed up dances with happy rhythms that stimulated their motor response. The result was a remarkable increase of the capacity to judge reality. The deliriums and hallucinations vanished.
These initial experiences constituted the basis for the creation of a draft Theoretical Model. This model had exercises that lead to inward states on one side of the axis, and on the other there were dances that strengthened the identity.
Over time, Toro concluded that the awareness of identity and the inward state were entirely complementary and bridged the totality of human experience. During the inward state, the individual tends to dissolve in the totality of the universe and to lose the perception of his body limits. On the other side of the experience axis, the awareness of identity gives the individual the feeling of being the center of the perception of the world.
These two states were then enhanced with exercises of contact and communication. New experiences with children, teenagers, families and senior citizens perfected the Theoretical Model over the years.
In 1970 the Catholic University of Chile solicited Rolando Toro to create the first Biodanza class, which at that time he still called "Psychodance."
The Theoretical Model kept growing with the introduction of new contact and communication exercises, dances of creativity and with the description and measurement of the neuropsychological effects of the exercises on different clinical conditions.
Biodanza sessions eventually found their way to healthy people in non-clinical settings.
In the meantime, Rolando Toro is the president of the International Biocentric Foundation (IBF), the body in charge of guiding, coordinating, organizing and administrating the Biodanza movement worldwide. There are 100 Teacher Training Schools in Latin America, Europe and South Africa, and now recently also in the United States, in San Francisco.
The IBF supervises research and scientific development in various areas, as well as the coordination of courses, seminars and international events.
Rolando Toro lives in Chile, from where he directs and coordinates the activities of Biodanza. He is also founding member and honorary president of the “Associazione Europea Insegnanti di Biodanza," the European Association of Biodanza Teachers.
San Francisco School of Biodanza, (415) 339-8739, info@biodanza.us
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