New Age Retreat Drums Up Fancy Footwork
The Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in Rhinebeck, N.Y., is one of the largest New Age learning centers in the country. It sprawls across 80 acres of tranquil glade and forest.
It is quiet, removed. There are no newspapers or alcohol. Accommodations are Spartan. Campers are called to vegetarian meals by blasts on a conch shell.
Omega has been in operation for 18 years. It is a friendly place where people go around smiling indiscriminately at strangers and hugging each other a lot. Skepticism as a human trait is not admired.
Omega’s summer courses include Meditation for Beginners; Choices in Dying; Healing Ourselves, Changing the World.
Many people drawn to camps of this kind often have aims that are not easily described.
What they are looking for, said one student of the Nigerian drumming master, Babatunde Olatunji, is “something deeper and beyond the everyday.”
Olatunji’s class is one of the most popular at Omega. For hours on end his students pound their drums, working their way toward a dreamy Nirvana, or some other nice place.
In the meantime, nearby, Nora Dinzelbacher’s tango students stumble through their acrobatic maneuvers and steps, the “ochos,” “paradas,” “sacadas,” “voleos,” to the recorded rhythms of Francisco Canaro and Carlos di Sarli.
Stig Regli, an engineer, took the class not only to fulfill his decades-old dream, but because he thought the effort of learning the tango would help his concentration.
“I’m involved in meditation,” he said, “and workshops like these help me seize the quality of the moment, to live in the here and now.”
Charlie Wilkins, a lobbyist, and his wife, Leah, a “psychic counselor,” are hoping the tango will move their relationship in a direction they want it to go.
As Leah Wilkins put it over a lunch of millet loaf and carrots: “My nature is to want to take charge of everything and everybody. His nature is to sit back and let me. With the tango he has to take charge and I have to surrender.” She paused.
“At least I do if I want to dance.”