CTA’s Arts in Ministry referral program brings performing groups together with appreciative audiences. Here’s a profile of an artist who will grace our West Coast National Conference in August.
“I see dance flowing from the sanctuary out into the world,” says Carla De Sola, director of the Omega West Dance Company in Berkeley, Calif. “Liturgical dance comes from the church, and moves us directly into issues of peace and justice.”
It was through the Catholic Worker movement many years ago that she found this connection between dance, spirituality and justice. It led her to establish New York City’s Omega Liturgical Dance Company in 1975. Ten years ago, Carla branched out to California to begin Omega West.
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| Carla De Sola: Dance meets spirituality and justice. (Photo: Beverly Hall) |
Carla will lead “Dance and the Living Spirit” at the CTA West Coast National Conference in Los Angeles, Aug. 3-5. She will gather participants in an experience of music, readings, and dance. “When we engage our whole being in dance and prayer,” she says, “we find ourselves alive with motion, rhythm, shape and dynamics. We experience dance integrally with our religious imagination.”
In addition to directing Omega West, Carla teaches at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where she has developed classes in dance and scripture, liturgical dance, sacred dance for healing, women’s spirituality, and PeaceRites, under the auspices of the Center for the Arts, Religion and Education. She has traveled all over the U.S. and abroad. Her video, “Movement Meditations to the Songs of Taize”, is available through Paulist Press. Call 1-800-218-1903. Her book,“PeaceRites”, can be ordered through the Oregon Catholic Press at 1-800-548-8749.