April 30, 2024
Ever since Maegan Melissa Gorbett experienced her first house party at the age of 18, she has been fascinated by the liberating potential of dance when it has the conscious intention of connecting people in something deeper. As DJ Alma ∞ Omega, she has dedicated herself for many years to creating such spaces of movement in which ritual forces are also at work.
evolve: When were you first touched by ritual?
Alma Omega: Growing up in the United States I was raised in a culture devoid of ritual. I've gotten nibbles of a richer ritual landscape through rituals like Christmas. My mom worked night shift, so we didn't even have the ritual of coming together for food. It was just such a hyper-individualistic culture, everyone eating their own meals, everyone having their own TV in their room.
My journey has been around the displacement of the American dominant culture. It’s a dominance that's robbing us of the richness of ritual space, whether the simplicity of a ritual like praying for the day or something extravagant like a community celebration.
e: When did you get the sense that you want to devote your life to new forms of ritual?
AO: A very pivotal moment for me was when I was 18, living in the Netherlands and being at one of my first house parties. The party was a ritualistic-feast, and I had the feeling that there's an untamed wildness that had been suppressed in me was coming back online. In the late 90s, I was living in Washington, DC, and every Sunday evening, there was a ritual gathering with house music. This music is rooted from African, American, Latino and queer bodies – that’s where the roots of house music are actually coming from. This coming together was a pure liberation through dance. It was like going to church for me. These are some of the most pure moments of my life, realizing the power of music and dance to liberate the human spirit.
Ever since Maegan Melissa Gorbett experienced her first house party at the age of 18, she has been fascinated by the liberating potential of dance when it has the conscious intention of connecting people in something deeper. As DJ Alma ∞ Omega, she has dedicated herself for many years to creating such spaces of movement in which ritual forces are also at work.
evolve: When were you first touched by ritual?
Alma Omega: Growing up in the United States I was raised in a culture devoid of ritual. I've gotten nibbles of a richer ritual landscape through rituals like Christmas. My mom worked night shift, so we didn't even have the ritual of coming together for food. It was just such a hyper-individualistic culture, everyone eating their own meals, everyone having their own TV in their room.
My journey has been around the displacement of the American dominant culture. It’s a dominance that's robbing us of the richness of ritual space, whether the simplicity of a ritual like praying for the day or something extravagant like a community celebration.
e: When did you get the sense that you want to devote your life to new forms of ritual?
AO: A very pivotal moment for me was when I was 18, living in the Netherlands and being at one of my first house parties. The party was a ritualistic-feast, and I had the feeling that there's an untamed wildness that had been suppressed in me was coming back online. In the late 90s, I was living in Washington, DC, and every Sunday evening, there was a ritual gathering with house music. This music is rooted from African, American, Latino and queer bodies – that’s where the roots of house music are actually coming from. This coming together was a pure liberation through dance. It was like going to church for me. These are some of the most pure moments of my life, realizing the power of music and dance to liberate the human spirit.
e: How did you start your own work as a DJ?
AO: I first started collecting records in the late 90’s, and semi-professionally started DJing in the early millenium. I moved to Berlin in 2010 and went through a deep death period, letting go of a long relationship. I was living with an amazing woman named Ruby May. Ruby had just come back from Bali where she experienced her first cacao ceremony. She really motivated me to get back into my music and dance. We started doing some of the first cacao dance ceremonies in Berlin, and that started to heal and activate a lot of things inside of me. It started to bring people together in this ritualized fashion.
Then at one point, “Lucid” started as a space in Berlin: no cigarette smoke, no drinking or intoxication, but also no dogma. It was very grassroots: we started to blend different subcultures and scenes. We did it every month for two years, channeling these big co-creational ritualistic gatherings, followed by various offshoots for 4-5 more years.
e: When did you start thinking of these gatherings as a contemporary ritual?
AO: Ruby was much more aware that this is a ritual space. I became more and more conscious of it – and I'm still becoming conscious of the impact of what it means to create a ritual space.
Within “Lucid” people would be ritually greeted entering the space. I would always be the one who was deejaying first, before the main ritual. I was sensitive to the field of people coming in, I could psychically feel all of their insecurities, all the dynamics in which humans feel lost in a space with others. Then some people would dance with my music, and I would try to create a safe space by engaging with them. Then we would have the main ritual and I would see: We're going from this lost situation where everyone were fragments--as these lost atoms--to bringing people into a tapestry that we're weaving. We're weaving a web and connecting people to themselves, to each other, to the Earth, to something bigger.
e: What makes a dance party just a dance party and what makes it a ritual?
AO: The intention behind the entity that is creating it is absolutely important. When you know that there's an intention, a collective consciousness behind it, that is a ground for ritual. Working within the shamanic realms, we are more careful of what portals and doors we are opening. Dance parties, or however you call it, are one of the modern ways where people are coming together to gather and to connect. If such an event is held by a space holder or a collective frequency where I really resonate, then something in me that relaxes.
e: There seems to be a deep longing in you for certain communal expressions. But at a certain point, you decided to study ritual and shamanism more specifically, right?
AO: Yes, I was dancing the Five Rhythms for many years. It was developed in the early 70s by Gabrielle Roth as a ritualistic dance form that is going in waves and patterns. Gabrielle Roth cracked a code in understanding the waves of life. This is also what ecstatic dance is now based upon. The roots are Five Rhythms: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness. I was studying this for 15 years and after Gabrielle Roth passed away, I studied Open Floor with the 3 women who helped form the 5 Rhythms. I went deep into embodied dance exploration, as well as working on the shamanic plant medicine path with various teachers.
e: From where you are now, what would you say that ritual is?
AO: Ritual is part of the ancient expression of what it means to be human. Thankfully there are some of these ancient lineages that have been preserved. I’m bowing to the First Nations people around the world that have been struggling to maintain their lineages through their lands and their communities. For maintaining the different tapestries of their connection through ritual with the earth and with higher sources.
I feel there is a huge calling right now in these times of multiple crises to find, rediscover, remember, revitalize ritual. We are being called to reawaken and re-establish this connection with ourselves, with the Earth and with something bigger than just the material.
e: How does ritual do that?
AO: It is helping to reawaken the understanding that we are part of a larger tapestry and that we are interconnected. This is part of the repair from the psyche that thinks that it's just this disconnected lonely island that's supposed to get all of its needs and desires met. Ritual is helping us to repair and understand that this hole inside is not going to be filled by consumer goods. What I'm yearning for is to feel this dynamic relational interbeing with everything past, present, future. I'm calling in my ancestors, I can feel their prayers and I can also pray for the future generations. I'm invoking their spirits; I'm feeling the connectivity of my body connected to this slice of earth that's connected to all the other slices of Earth. The ritual space can evoke this multidimensionality in us. We've lost this connection with the multidimensionality and therefore also the fabric of magic and our actual empowerment, vibrancy, the aliveness that we are part of this tapestry. We're not just pawns in the game of life, but our lives, our thoughts, our actions have meaning. We're all co-creating this reality and I feel that ritual space can revolutionize the human spirit from being disconnected victims in the game of life, to become actual agents of engagement, aliveness, vibrancy, and communion with life.
e: Are there next steps you want to go with this work on dance and ritual?
AO: Recently I finished a training with Francis Weller, one of the main grief tenders from the lineage of Malidoma Somé. He's said that we're entering the Long Dark right now as humanity. And more and more of us need to hold spaces for grief tending. We need to come together and feel the different layers of what's happening right now on the planet and give allowance for deeper emotions to move. For me this has to do with finding the axis between grief and celebration. It’s important to open up these wells of grief and at the same time feeling the juiciness, gratitude, and joy of life. My time here in Bahia, Brazil, is showing me a next level, being in cultural spaces that are coming from the ancestral roots of surviving slavery and turning that into the poetry of beauty through samba, capoeira and maracatu. I feel very humbled to witness this beauty. It gives me so much hope for the human spirit.
This article was first published in the German evolve Magazin no. 42.
The interview was conducted by Elizabeth Debold.
