Healing rhythm

<p>Even on the gray days of winter, there is plenty of heat and light inside an African dance exercise class. Participants emerge from their workout drenched, de-stressed and with a new swivel in their walk. </p><div class="art_item art_item_inset art_item_facts"> <h3>Facts</h3> <h4>On the Web</h4> <p>For more information on African dance classes go to www.krisfreewoman.com</p> </div> <p>In the world of fitness whose practitioners seek ever new ways from hip-hop to hula hoop to move their bodies, the primal popularity of tribal dance continues to gain new recruits.</p><p>Teacher Kris Freewoman of Santa Rosa, who gives African dance classes around Sonoma County and has trained 30 other teachers in the form, calls African dance “the perfect blend of dance and athletics.”</p><p>With its fluid and rhythmic movements, African dance is an ideal way to liberate and lubricate the spine “which doesn’t get used enough in our culture,” Freewoman said.</p><p>Freewoman, who has taught in local fitness clubs since 1991, began incorporating African dance into her step and aerobics classes when she recognized that the dance style “brings us back to what our bodies are made to do.”</p><p>Diana Duggan, a Healdsburg artist, agrees. She was drawn in after watching a class “of blissful dancers moving with rhythm to the beat of the drums and all joyfully sweating.”</p><p>She said African dance exercise with its “healing rhythms” and high- and low-impact moves gives her flexibility, core strength, a cardio workout and “a natural way to maintain good spiritual, mind and body health.”</p><p>Different from Zumba, another popular workout that combines the social dance styles of rhumba, salsa and cha-cha, African dance is tribal in music and form, often imitating hunting, planting and gathering movements. A typical African dance workout might include the different moves of Congolese, West African and Zebala dance styles. Sometimes dancers are skittering across the floor in a crouch, sometimes up and waving their hands in the air and singing out a tribal chant, accompanied by live drumming or a CD of techno tribal fusion.</p><p>Dance workout clothes can be as primal as you want. From sarongs and barefeet to aerobic shoes and yoga pants.</p><p>It’s all about “moving your muscles in a way that causes you to let go and have fun,” said Freewoman. And “to connect you with the part of yourself that loves to dance.”</p>