Shiva Rea - Yoga Trance Dance

Appropriate for all ages and experience levels, Yoga Trance Dance begins with prana-initiating yogasanas, flowing into an exploration of free-form, breath-driven movement to free your creative life force and cultivate embodied freedom. It features the Yoga Matrix format, which allows you to customize your practice by choosing and organizing portions of the program to suit your needs every time you use the DVD.

Filmed at White Sands National Park, the program was shot in HD by Hollywood’s Sion Michel (Memoirs of a Geisha) and directed by yoga teacher and fashion photographer James Wvinner for an inspiring look and feel unlike any other yoga or fitness video.

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Released some two years after 2004's Yoga Shakti, one of the finest yoga programs on the market, Shiva Rea's Yoga Trance Dance is substantially different in content but every bit the former's equal in terms of style and presentation. Combining what she calls "two of the oldest ways (to get) back home," Rea has mixed dance and yoga to create "a contemporary exploration of conscious movement meditation," with an eye toward healing the split between body and mind that has, she says, led many of us to live primarily "from the neck up." As was the case with Yoga Shakti, several pre-set practices are offered (six in this case, ranging from 29 to 41 minutes in length); and the DVD again features the innovative "Yoga Matrix," which allows users to customize their practice by choosing and organizing various segments to suit their own needs and moods. Yet because of the dance element, most comparisons to a traditional yoga program don't apply. Whereas vinyasa yoga is essentially a series of flowing, connected poses, incorporating breath and movement and cultivating heat, strength, flexibility, and balance, here the movement is within the poses themselves, not just within the overall sequence. Thus familiar asanas such as the cobra and downward facing dog take on a new aspect, with users encouraged to constantly roll their shoulders from side to side in cobra or make undulating, wave-like spinal movements in down dog (both can be found in the terrific jala namaskar, the so-called "water salutation"); it's a style that may be somewhat more familiar to practitioners of kundalini yoga than those used to the more widespread, Iyengar-based hatha tradition. Meanwhile, the trance dance sections encourage spontaneous, free-form movement that may well lead to the kind of creative self-expression and loosening of inhibitions that Rea prescribes. Visually stunning (it was shot in high definition at New Mexico's White Sands National Monument) and augmented by a fine world music soundtrack (a music-only option is available) and Rea's soothing, authoritative presence, the DVD also includes a mini-documentary about the instructor, bonus comments by a couple of experts, and more. --Sam Graham