24 October 2025
Dancing Psychedelics
Between Ecstasy and Worldmaking
By: Ana Flecha, Ph.D.
MAPS Bulletin: Volume XXXIV
At the MAPS Psychedelic Science 2025 conference in Denver, I had the privilege of being part of the panel Between Ecstasy and Escapism: Raving as a Contemporary Ritual. The speakers examined how raving, sometimes framed as escapist hedonism, actually functions as a historic and ongoing site of community, healing, and contemporary ritual practice. I was on the panel to contribute insights from my research on the Santo Daime bailado, a ritual dance performed in the força (force or energy) of ayahuasca, referred to as daime and considered a sacrament.
Santo Daime is considered to be a school, and in this school, the daime sacrament is the “professor of all professors” accessible upon ingestion through teachings received by practitioners. Many of us may have negative associations with school from our childhoods remembering traumatic experiences of discipline, oppression and tedium as we were forced to sit still and ingest information we may not have found at all interesting. Based on my research on the Santo Daime bailado, in this article I highlight the potential of dance in the quest for healing with psychedelics as part of a different kind of school that values corporeality and corporeal knowledge in the larger quest to build new, alternative worlds from the one we are currently living in.
To understand the deep and enduring socio-cultural values of any dance, it is necessary to consider the historical context it came from. Santo Daime was founded in the 1930s in Acre, Brazil combining Indigenous Amazonian plant knowledge with Afro-Brazilian spiritualities, esoteric European traditions, and Catholic influence as part of what I consider to be a Caboclo knowledge system. The term Caboclo refers to an Indigenous person of mixed ancestry. As the chief agents of the rubber boom years in the Amazon basin, Caboclo expertise, familiarity with the forest, and ability to accumulate new knowledge contextualizes the choreography of the Santo Daime bailado as an eclectic educational activity of the Forest.
Beneath its formal repetition, the bailado is a dynamic practice of alignment and transformation. To dance in the force of daime is to encounter an altered body-mind relationship in which sensations and self-awareness are heightened, time bends, and space is charged with perceptual and affective fluidity. Deceptively simple, the effects of performing the bailado across extended periods of time are profound, invoking visions, insights, and emotional revelations.
In performances of the bailado, the body is animated and agentic calling in, receiving, and realizing visions, emotions, and cosmological insights through patterned movement so they can be studied and incorporated into the formation of desirable worlds through sound and movement. The dance itself is deceptively simple with minimal steps performed swaying from one side to the other in tightly ordered lines, guided by the rhythm of hymns sung while playing maracás, handheld shaker instruments. The bailado thus enacts a choreography of intersubjective coherence in which individuals sync their steps to each other, to the hymns, and to the plant spirit world, creating a collective vessel for navigating the stormy seas of the ayahuasca experience and of life more generally.
On the surface, rave floors and Amazonian temples might appear worlds apart. One pulses with strobe lights and bass drops, the other with hymns and candlelight. Yet both bring people together through dance, rhythm, and state-altering medicines, crafting worlds that reconfigure relationships to self, community, and the cosmos. Both reveal that dance, especially when joined with psychedelics, is capable of going beyond entertainment or diversion. Dance is a method of knowing, a catalyst for transformation, and a collective act of worldmaking.
Dance as Method
Psychedelics have long been framed through the language of chemistry, neurology, and therapeutic intervention. In contemporary Western contexts, their value is often measured in terms of biomarkers and clinical outcomes, stripped from the ritual, aesthetic, and relational worlds that have shaped their use for generations. Yet when we look beyond the clinic to embodied practices like dance, psychedelics reveal themselves not merely as substances but as forces that choreograph relations between bodies, environments, and imaginations. In the Santo Daime bailado as in raves dance is not an accessory to psychedelic experience but a central technique of navigation, transformation, and world-making. Dance as method implies investigation as well as expression. Practitioners take on roles of both audience and performer in this dance, contributing to the calling in of what are known as currents, expansive, visceral states of knowledge circulation between seen and unseen realms.
Santo Daime currents are amplified in bailado works allowing for direct multi sensorial engagement with one’s corporeality and consciousness as a spectrum. The bailado shows us that learning in psychedelic spaces is not only cognitive or verbal, but proprioceptive, felt through joints, breath, subtle shifts of balance, and sensorial discourse. Proprioception is our body’s ability to sense its own position and movement, how each gesture feels from the inside, and where our various parts and limbs are in space and time. It is how we know ourselves corporeally composing a live tracking of movement from within. Amplifying our proprioceptive senses, dancing with psychedelics may therefore help us cultivate self-awareness as part of a quest for healing, perceiving ourselves as whole and as part of the worlds we move through.
Corpo-Imaginal Myth-Making
In the bailado, participants enact a new cosmology as part of a method of self-study, studying their feelings, desires, projections, habits and patterns of knowing within a community that spans human and nonhuman beings alike engaging with and expanding their imaginations. The hymns sung while dancing call upon spirits, plants, rivers, and celestial beings to tell original stories. As participants perform the steps repetitively, they both contribute to and draw upon the current they are invoking through their performance weaving what I call corpo-imaginal myth-making.
Blending bodily experience and visionary imagination into shared worlds of meaning, this work links people to the forest, the sea, to ancestors, and to divine figures offering an important corrective to dominant psychedelic models that reduce medicines to chemical interactions in the brain. Psychedelics are also social and mythic technologies that generate shared worlds. The multidimensionality of dance as an embodied practice expands these processes so we may be more conscious of our agency in shaping these worlds in alignment with our dreams and collective desires beyond individual healing.
Beyond Set and Setting
Much of psychedelic research today emphasizes the importance of “set and setting”—the psychological mindset of the individual and the physical and social environment of the experience. While this framework was groundbreaking in the 1960s, it now risks oversimplification, framing context as a backdrop or container rather than as the substance of psychedelic experience. Dance practices like the bailado and rave culture reveal the limitations of this model. In these spaces, context is not external but is created through movement, rhythm, and collective intention. The dance is not a setting for psychedelic experience but is the psychedelic technology itself. To reduce such practices to “set and setting” misses their richness, their histories, and their power as modes of survival, resistance, and renewal.
Studying the bailado raises critical questions about the politics of knowledge in the field of psychedelic science. Much of the current excitement around psychedelics in the Global North emphasizes medicalization, commodification, and individualized therapy, often erasing the embodied, collective, and Indigenous-rooted practices that have sustained these substances for centuries. The bailado intervenes as a counterpoint to this hegemonic narrative demonstrating that psychedelics are not reducible to molecules acting on brains but are part of complex systems of ritual, music, movement, and myth. To understand psychedelics only through the clinic is to perpetuate colonial patterns of extraction, stripping the plants from their cultural ecologies and ignoring the embodied knowledges that give them meaning. Dance makes this explicit revealing dimensions of psychedelic experience that cannot be captured in brain scans or clinical metrics and showing us that psychedelics are not only substances, but catalysts for relational, mythic, and choreographic work.
Unlike a pill taken in silence, the bailado insists on participation, on collective rhythm, on the arduous yet joyous labor of synchronizing with others. It resists the privatization of healing and instead enacts an ethic of relationality. Healing happens in and through community, through shared steps and songs, through myth made of movement.
In a time when many feel disoriented by overlapping ecological, political, and existential crises, the lessons of the bailado are urgently relevant, revealed step by step, breath by breath, body to body. Raves and the Santo Daime bailado both remind us that in dancing together, we practice futures otherwise. We perform ways of being in community, ways of relating to the Earth, ways of imagining ourselves into being corporeally and sensorially. These are not escapes from reality; they are performances that form desirable worlds.
Psychedelics open doors. Dance teaches us how to walk—or sway, swagg, or samba—through them.
Ana Flecha, Ph.D.
Ana Flecha has a Ph.D. from the Latin American and Latino Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, situating her research in critical dance studies and studies of Brazilian popular culture. She directs the Espaço Flecha do Mar, a cultural center in the Northeast of Brazil, where she teaches and hosts dance and music events, contributing to the local arts scene and receiving cultural workers and teachers from around the globe. Through her research and creative work Ana advocates for proprioceptive justice, each one’s right to bring their whole self to research, performance, and educational endeavors. She works to expand definitions of dance, and ways dance is conceived and consumed.
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