Friday, October 28, 2005
7:30 PM
An Evening with Robin Sylvan
author of Trance Formation:
The Spiritual and Religious Dimensions
Of Global Rave Culture

7:30-8:30pm Presentation on the New Book
8:30-10:00pm Electronic Dance Music Ceremony

Cost: $5-10 sliding scale


Location: Vancouver BC. Near Main/Terminal. Location address forthcoming...


Over the course of nearly two decades, the rave scene has evolved into
much more than simply an electronic dance music party. For thousands of
people around the world, it has become an important source of
spirituality and the closest thing they have to a religion. Trance
Formation is an ethnographically rich look into the spiritual
dimensions of rave culture from a theoretically informed religious
studies perspective. Combining firsthand accounts, extensive
interviews with ravers, and cutting edge scholarly analysis, Robin
Sylvan takes the reader on a colorful journey from San Francisco to
London, from Burning Man to the Love Parade, and reveals a synaesthetic
spiritual world of sound, sight, motion, and deep trance. As religious
studies converges on a new understanding of emerging forms of
spirituality, Trance Formation will be welcomed by scholars and
students, music-lovers and trance-dancers, spiritual seekers and fans
of cutting edge culture, as well as the ravers about whom this book is
written.

"Millions of people on every continent of planet Earth, regularly
coming together in ecstatic trance-dance celebrations held and
energized by pulsing electronic beats, are having the deepest spiritual
experience of their lives. In this thoroughly fascinating study,
religious scholar Robin Sylvan makes a convincing case for regarding
the global rave culture as an authentic expression of a unifying
spiritual vision that integrates across all languages, religions and
nationalities. Reading this book, as well as going to a rave, will
leave you inspired and hopeful for our sadly fractured world. "

Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., co-author of The Psychedelic Experience and author of
The Unfolding Self.

Our evening will begin with a presentation on Trance Formation in
which Robin will share material from the new book and go into some of
its key themes in detail. Then we will have a more hands-on experience
of rave trance dancing, as Robin leads us through an electronic dance
music ceremony. Using sacred intentionality, ritual practices, and
specific movements, gestures, and formations, we will focus and direct
the powerful energy of the trance dance experience in a ceremonial
context in a specially designed hour-long sequence of music. We will
trace the arc of a ceremony creating a sacred container, generating
energy, and dedicating that energy through trance dancing to
electronic dance music, so that the ceremony, like the rave experience
itself, is danced/embodied/enacted rather than spoken.

Robin Sylvan, Ph.D., is the founder and director of The Sacred Center,
a spiritually-oriented educational organization in the San Francisco
Bay Area. He has taught in both mainstream academic and alternative
experiential contexts. He is the author of Traces of the Spirit: The
Religious Dimensions of Popular Music, and has been a music aficionado
and spiritual seeker for most of his life.