The art of creating an Ecstatic Dance playlist

Ever since I finished my Ecstatic Dance DJ & Facilitator training, I started practicing putting together sensual dance journeys for my myself and my dancing clients. Putting together an Ecstatic Dance playlist is truly an art, because there are many steps to that process and it usually involves hours and hours of scanning the web and then putting the music together. Here is a little insight into the art of an amazing playlist:

1) Searching the web for amazing artists across various genres from meditation & medicinal music, to percussions, house music, bass, funk, world music, electronic, tribal music and then buying the music to support the artists. Yes, I now have a “monthly music budget”. I usually search artists on YouTube and then either go to their website to buy the song or go to Bandcamp.

2) Labelling songs into 6 dance waves. Once I bought the music, it gets divided into 6 folders. It is now a very intuitive process. I buy the song and automatically know which of the 6 waves the song goes in:

 
3) Selecting the final songs for the playlist. Some songs make it into the playlist and then if they don’t give me the shivers or shakes when I play them, they make it out of the playlist again. Any song that makes it into the playlist needs to make my body move, otherwise we won’t dance together to it.

4) Putting the songs onto the DJ decks, applying filters and working with the volume fader to make sure there is a smooth transition between the songs. Then I hit the record button and start sweating in anticipation whether I get it right. Sometimes I make a mistake with a transition or a filter. I then try and smoothen out my mistakes by exporting the final playlist into another editing software and correct any mistakes in case I turned up the volume too quickly or a filter transition was too abrupt.

5) Uploading the song onto Soundcloud and then listening back to my own playlist to check in how the playlist makes my body feel. I love the way certain filters create shivers in my body. Yum!

Music is truly medicine for the soul! I only realised the power of music when I started creating my own playlists and getting hands on involved in the process. It’s like my body opened up to receive the delicious ingredients of the songs being played. Who needs food, when you can digest music!

PS: I am planning an Ecstatic Dance & Paint event 🎧🎨💃 for next month with the topic “Song of the Soul” with the gorgeous Corina Capri on Saturday, 06th March 2021.
Save the date, more info to follow.