Gabrielle Roth

Gabrielle Roth, known as the "urban shaman," is music director of the Mirrors. Her primal trance-dance music grew from her involvement with ballet, drama, movement therapy, ritual, and shamanic principles. The cultural melting pot of New York City and the emerging consciousness scene at California's Esalen Institute also helped shape Roth's style. As Roth encouraged her dance students to move and emote, she noticed a natural rhythmic progression, which she calls The Wave or the 5 Rhythms. She saw that many of life's events, such as childbirth and lovemaking, moved from flowing to staccato to chaos to lyrical and then to stillness. Dancing to these natural rhythms could move beyond the ego's personality and help catalyze and release the emotions of fear, anger, grief, joy, and peace -- ending with the state of ecstasy. Roth's slogan, "Sweat Your Prayers," epitomizes her approach to both her movement workshops and recordings, released on her Raven Recording label. "We can dance our prayers and sweat our pain," says Roth. "Prayer is like letting go of everything that impedes the inner silence, of the tone, the OM, the essence of self and soul. Each of the five rhythms represents a state of being, and being is the language of existence. Movement, then, is our medicine and our path to ecstasy. So The Wave is how I pray. " Roth's recordings began from her work with the rock & roll band of her New York ritual theatre company, the Mirrors. "The first two albums I wrote were tribal rock and roll," she explains, "but then we decided to make simpler, primal recordings, like the music I used for my movement workshops. That's how Totem was born in 1985. This album was a groundbreaker; at that time the New Age stores could not relate to rhythms and drums as a spiritual path. Totem...