I’m Keith Armstrong. I started working with Sacred Dance in 1979 after meeting Anna Barton at the One Earth Conference in the Centre for Alternative Technology, Machynlleth, Wales. In November that year I attended a workshop with her in November at the Montessori School in Cardigan, Wales. The following February I visited Findhorn to take Experience Week and a week long Sacred Dance workshop with Anna, arranging a tour of Wales for her later that year. Together we danced in Bangor, Llanidloes, and Haverfordwest before moving on to London to dance with David Roberts at the Mind, Body and Spirit Festival in Olympia.
It was immediately obvious that Anna Barton was doing something rather different from other dance teachers. I describe her skill as ‘the ability to draw the dance into people, to create group unity and through integration to bring the healing quality of the dance to the group as a whole’.
While at Findhorn I danced several times with Bernhard Wosien and his pupils, Friedel Kloke Eibl and Maria-Gabriele Wosien and learned that Bernhard’s teacher ‘said his masters went back to Pythagoras’.
Through the early 1980s I worked with Anna regularly, helping to create a small library of books and improving the condition of the music, as well as helping to organise workshops and creating some of the first guest tapes under her direction. Accompanying Anna on a tour of Holland and France I introduced some New Games to the groups. In 1984 I took the dance to Sweden, introducing this movement in Dance to Finland where it became very popular.
Working in Germany. and Scandinavia through the late 1980s, I also held workshops in Spain and at various camps in Britain.
I have introduced the dance to a number of different groups and venues including the Prometheus Trust Conferences, holding a group at St David’s College, Lampeter, University of Wales where I was studying Archaeology, IT and Religious Studies.
I am still teaching the sacred in dance and am always open to invitations to bring this unique, ancient heritage to you.