In Śrīla Prabhupāda’s Kīrtana Standards I didn’t say much about dancing. I told a bit about what Śrīla Prabhupāda liked: “The dancing should be done enthusiastically by raising the hands like Panca-Tattva. All of Lord Caitanya’s followers used to dance with raised hands. If someone dances with ecstasy, that is all right, but it is better to dance with raised hands”1. I told of some concocted dancing Śrīla Prabhupāda didn’t like, and of some dancing he liked.
But there are various moves and figures we often see in ISKCON dancing that I didn’t talk about, with motifs from square dancing, barn dancing, breakdancing, and what have you. It can be, well, interesting to see South Indian ISKCON brahmanas, for example, enthusiastically engaged in American barn-dance moves because—well, that’s the ecstatic dancing we’ve learned in ISKCON.
As Śrīla Prabhupāda once said, “Sometimes dancing is done here in peculiar method.”2
In the videos below, leave aside the mixing of men and women and you may see much that seems familiar.
I’m not saying anything against all this. I just thought you might like to know where some of these dance moves come from.
Maybe if we’re ready to “dovetail” whatever might come our way, we could borrow from the Jews and take “ISKCON dancing” to another level.
Or maybe we’d rather stick more closely to our own tradition.
Notes:
1 Letter to Kīrtanānanda Swami, November 10, 1975
2 Conversation, July 8, 1976
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