The world of Biodanza with Rolando Toro

The following transcript is based on the interview with Rolando Toro on April 19, 2004

Biodanza
I conceived Biodanza as a poetry of human encounter.
As a different way of relating to one another –
in a world that is extremely lonely,
where people suffer from a lack of love,
and where perhaps what we most need in life is tenderness.

Perhaps Biodanza was born out of despair –
out of the desire to redeem ourselves
from our impoverishment,
from our lack of love, from our loneliness.

It is an aesthetics different from traditional dance.
The important thing was that everyone could dance –
not only the privileged ones, the “geniuses” of dance,
but that anyone could dance:
the child, the adolescent, the elderly,
the sick and the healthy,
the executive, the politician,
the teacher with their students.

Thus a new world would open,
where daily life could be lived with purity and naturalness –
in the midst of love.

But love is not a word –
it has become too worn out.
People, it seems to me,
have not yet discovered the true, profound essence of love.

Love is much more than loving your pet,
or your children, or your spouse.
Love is an organizing force within the human being,
which transcends the individual.
In other words, love has a global, radiant, powerful, integrating dimension.

Love is not something small, restricted to the personal.
To awaken love means to awaken a cosmic force.

The ethics of Biodanza are born of affectivity.
Ethical consciousness is the unfolding of a refined human quality,
which students gradually attain after some time of practicing Biodanza.

It is a transmutation of values –
and this transmutation can only come through affectivity.

This individual transformation,
this evolutionary process,
consists in feeling the other as part of yourself.

What happens to the other is happening to you.
When young people are killed in war – they are killing you.
When thousands of workers are exploited – they are exploiting you.

Because we are not isolated beings.
We are one whole, deeply interconnected – cosmically connected.
We are bound together, one to another.

And yet people cling to their personality,
to their individuality, to their little world,
because they have not yet evolved,
they lack ethical consciousness,
they lack compassion,
they lack affectivity.

To me, the greatest political act that exists
is the embrace.

If people walked hand in hand through the streets,
meeting each other in solidarity, embracing each other –
they would be doing politics.

Thus, the embrace, the kiss, the encounter
are not something trivial.
A person who enters into that “ceremony”
enters a process of transformation.

And this is scientifically proven –
it is no hypothesis.

Life is in the woman who nurses her child.
Life is in the lovers who seek each other with passion,
wanting to merge together.
Life is in the elder who plays with his grandchildren.
Life is in the farmer who cultivates his field.

In a world of war,
in a century that has been the cruelest in all of human history,
it is absolutely necessary to propose dance,
to propose singing,
to propose the embrace.

For every rifle, every missile, every bomber –
there must be embraces, kisses, dances.

If you asked me what those of us in Biodanza want,
I would say: to awaken the energy of love –
the atomic bomb of love –
so that it reaches the entire planet,
spreading into the provinces,
the villages,
to the farthest corners of the Earth.

Perhaps I will not live to see
the critical mass reached,
the tipping point.
But I am absolutely certain
that this point will come.

And for this we have hundreds of teachers,
who are struggling –
struggling by dancing –
to reach that goal.

And so,
when I must one day say farewell to this world,
I will go without sadness.
I will go with immense trust
that better times will come.

We will have better times –
without massacres,
without competitiveness,
without injustice,
without grave illnesses,
without crime.

We will have better times – of this I have no doubt.
Because that is the destiny of humanity.

The destiny of humanity is not the omnipotence of money,
nor the omnipotence of technology.
The destiny of humanity is: love.