Personal guidance
You can spend long hours learning, but if you're working in a group of several dozen, you're often left to your own devices because there's only one teacher who can't dedicate much attention to everyone. Our teacher-to-student ratio is 1 to 2 or 1 to 4. This close-to-personal guidance is a unique approach at dance retreats. This way you learn more and progress faster than in other dance classes.

Unravel your native dancer
Some people are lucky enough to grow up dancing. Others learn it later in life, often thinking that dancing is about steps, patterns, or frames. For us, dancing is breathing and moving in response to vibration and sound. Learning these fundamentals is key to unravelling the natural dancer within. We are here to help you do this through a specially designed program where each element is set and planned to synergistically build your progress.

Come as you are
Workshops are often targeted at dancers of specific skill levels. This is partly because it’s easier to convey knowledge to large groups that way. DanceMode Immersions work differently. They are very intimate, allowing each participant to be guided almost individually. This event is tailored to your needs and abilities. We gather at the beginning of the retreat, work with each participant, and create a unique schedule that will improve your skills regardless of your dance level. Many dance teachers and beginners alike have participated in our immersions. We welcome you regardless of your level of dance experience.

Connection Through Curiosity

Connection at DanceMode is built through open curiosity rather than social expectation. We try to meet you exactly where you are—emotionally, physically, neurologically—while sharing who we are in return. In this exchange, we find authentic connection rooted in genuine interest rather than surface performance.

Every Person Matters

We believe deeply in the value of each human being. No one should be dismissed, discarded, or minimized. No voice or identity is more important than another. It’s easy to connect with someone who shares your interests. The deeper work (and deeper intimacy) comes when we don’t fully understand each other. When we hold each other with spaciousness rather than judgment, we begin to create a culture that honors difference instead of fearing it.

At DanceMode, we practice equanimity, egalitarian care, and love that makes room for complexity. When assumptions fall away, authenticity rises. And from authenticity, real belonging becomes possible.

Dance, Culture & Respect

At DanceMode, we practice and share movement, dance, music, and ideas from many cultures—including cultures that are not native to us. These art forms come from lineages of lived experience, ancestry, history, and often from people who have endured oppression, displacement, and cultural erasure. We deeply value and honor the cultures, peoples, and histories that shaped these practices long before we encountered them.

When we engage with or borrow from artistic or ritual traditions, we do so out of genuine respect, curiosity, and passion for the healing, social, spiritual, and expressive elements they carry. We strive to learn from original sources whenever possible, and we invite native carriers, teachers, tradition keepers, and local communities to share their knowledge when available. We practice with intention—acknowledging the cultural roots, honoring the lineage, and creating space for these forms to continue evolving with dignity rather than extraction.

These practices enrich our lives, support our bodies, expand our cultural understanding, and give us pathways into shared community and human connection.

Living in Motion Across Lineages

DanceMode is about Living in Motion. We draw from:

• multiple Qi Gong and Daoist movement traditions
  
• martial arts lineages
  
• trauma-informed somatic work
  
• historical and contemporary dance forms
  
• movement education modalities
  
• breathwork and meditation practices
  
• cultural music traditions
  
• mind–body awareness schools
  
• health and wellness approaches from across the world
  
  

Each modality is offered with respect for its origins, and with gratitude for the people who preserved and transmitted such knowledge through generations.

A Practice of Curiosity

Everything we encounter here will naturally interact with our own upbringing, culture, nervous system, identity, and lived experience. You are invited to explore these practices with curiosity—try them on, feel what resonates, adapt what works, and leave aside what doesn’t. Nothing here is mandatory; everything is offered. You bring your history and your body, and you take with you whatever becomes meaningful or supportive on your path.

DanceMode simply offers the space, and the invitation. You choose your way through it.