Teachers

Evelyn Beck

Evelyn (“Evi”) Torton Beck has been dancing all her life, but when she found Sacred Circle Dance three decades ago, she knew she had come home to her spiritual practice. Evi has studied dance with a wide variety of teachers, including the founders of sacred dance at Findhorn in Scotland. She has wide experience teaching this form of dance across the United States, Europe, and Mexico. For decades she has facilitated dance circles in the tri-state DC/ MD/ VA area and currently holds a weekly circle in Washington, DC. During the worst of the covid years she offered twice weekly zoom dancing to an international community including. To the dance, she brings all of her previous experience and the joy of working in community. Her experience has shown her that the practice of Sacred Circle Dance is not only healing, but transformational. (See Beck, “The Transformational Power of Sacred Circle Dance” in the Handbook of Phenomenology, 2023)

Evi is a university professor who holds two Ph.D.s –one in Comparative Literature, the other in Clinical Psychology, and as a result has had several different careers—including as a founder of interdisciplinary gender and women’s studies; as a psychotherapist; and in the past three decades as a teacher of sacred circle dance. She has published widely on subjects as diverse as: the healing power of art in the work of Franz Kafka and Frida Kahlo, and the healing power of dance using phenomenological and somatic lenses. Her work is multicultural and honors the diversity of our communities.