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DeepeningTraining ElmDance
DeepeningTraining ElmDance
Around the planet, as people gather to work together for the healing of our world, a simple, beautiful practice is spreading. To celebrate their commitment to life and solidarity with activists the world over, they join hands in a circle dance. Set to the haunting strains of a Latvian song by Ieva Akuratere, and choreographed by Anastasia Geng, the Elm Dance took form in Germany in the 1980s. In 1992, having learned it from my friend Hannelore, I took the Elm Dance with me to workshops I was leading with a Russianspeaking team in areas poisoned by the Chernobyl disaster. There, and especially in Novozybkov, the most contaminated of inhabited cities, the dance became an expression of their will to live. It was here the dance evolved a distinctive form with the raising and swaying of arms, evoking their connection with the trees they so loved. When I was with the people of Novozybkov, I made them a promise: to tell their story wherever I went. In keeping that promise, I shared the Elm Dance. Then, in a way that no one could have imagined, the dance in this form began to spread, beyond all reckoning, with a momentum of its own, and became associated with The Work That Reconnects. We have come to realize that the dance gives activists and lovers of life the world over a tangible way to feel their bone-deep commitment and their solidarity with each other across the miles.
It was Harasch who insisted that we come to Novozybkov. A Russian psychologist practicing in Moscow, he had flown to Chernobyl within hours of the accident, to give support to the operators of the doomed reactor. In the six years that followed, he traveled to towns throughout the region to help the survivors, and none had touched his heart more deeply than this city and its fate. On the train, as we headed East from Minsk toward the Russian border, he pulled out the map and told us the story once more. The burning reactor was a volcano of radioactivity when the winds shifted to the Northeast, carrying the clouds of poisoned smoke in the direction of Moscow. To save the millions in the metropolitan area, a fast decision was taken to seed the clouds and cause them to precipitate. An unusually heavy late April rain, bearing intense concentrations of radioactive iodine, strontium, cesium, and particles of plutonium, drenched the towns and fields and forests of the Bryansk region, just across the Russian border from Chernobyl. The highest Geiger counter readings were measured, as they still are, in and around the agricultural and light-industrial city of Novozybkov. "The people there were not informed of their government's choice, who wants to tell people they're disposable? By now it's common knowledge that the clouds were seeded, but it is rarely mentioned. And that silence, too, is part of the tragedy for the people of Novozybkov."