Wake Up & Dance

What is Wake Up and Dance? It’s a practice my husband, Byron and I started one cold morning in January 2014. It’s a super simple practice. Every morning, we wake up and dance together to a song we choose that morning. That’s it! But it didn’t start as a practice. It started with a random (and awesome) Alicia Keys song on the radio that we couldn’t help but dance to. That morning we swayed our hips to the entire song and then left to go about our busy days. That evening we asked each other how the day went. When we both answered “great!” we decided to dance again the next morning. When we had great days two days in a row, we thought we might be on to something, so we kept going. After a month, we shared our practice via social media, first by posting our weekly playlist and then by posting Wake Up and Dance Saturday Videos (here’s one of my fav’s) and to our utter surprise and amazement the online community hit us in the face with tons of support. After awhile, people started sharing that they were dancing too! We heard about parents dancing with their kids, partners dragging their significant other out of bed to dance with them and even about teachers implementing dancing as the first activity of the school day! We were stoked.

For our one year dance anniversary we decided to throw the first ever Wake Up and Dance Daytime Dance JAM! (Check out this article about our Wake Up and Dance practice!) The turnout was off the hook. We had the very talented DJ Amante mix all of the songs we danced to that year (ya!) and make us our first ever Wake Up and Dance playlist. A few months later, back by popular demand, we hosted our second Wake Up and Dance Daytime Dance Jam: Dances for Anna Edition. We threw it in honour of my teacher, Anna Halprin’s 95th birthday. Anna is not just an accomplished dancer and artist but has also dedicated her life to the study of dance as a healing art. She’s creativity embodied and she’s basically my Yoda (yes, that’s a Star Wars reference.) The pictures below are from our jams. Oh, and CTV thought what we were doing was cool and news worthy so they came and covered our second jam. You can watch it here. Be sure to check it out! If you’re interested in trying out our Wake Up and Dance practice. Just try it. It might be a 3 minute life changer. It has been for us.