Dancing is something Jordine Raine has done from an early age and when she was little her local dance school was like her second home. When she left school there was no question about the path Jordine would take.
“I moved from WA to Victoria and studied at the University of Melbourne within the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) to do a Bachelor Degree in Dance and a Masters in Choreography and Creative Arts Therapies,” Jordine says.
“After I graduated from VCA I was awarded a travel scholarship and headed to Europe to start the audition circuit. I performed with a number of companies, worked with some brilliant choreographers and freelanced as a dancer, choreographer, dance teacher, and yoga instructor for nearly 20 years.”
Jordine’s work also took her to Israel and it was there that her attendance at a movement class led her into the arms of capoeira expert, Dor Shira.
Jordine says, “Despite the cultural and language differences it instantly felt like our love for dance, movement and play transcended any kind of barriers. We were speaking the same language and that language was ‘body’ language.”
After moving to Australia with Jordine three years ago, Dor started to look closely at the range of physiological and social implications of having an inactive body.
“There’s a huge amount of sedentarism in the world; you could also call it a physical inactivity pandemic,” Dor explains.
“It’s also closely linked to the increase in loneliness. There’s a growing disconnection from our bodies, from other people’s bodies and from the world. Children of today, especially in Western cultures, are the most sedentary generation of all time. They’re the mega-sedentary-generation.”
Research backs up what Dor says about the growing rate of loneliness as a 2023 survey across 142 countries revealed that nearly one in four people worldwide feel lonely. That translates into more than a billion people – with younger people experiencing more loneliness than their older counterparts.
With this in mind Jordine and Dor wanted to blend their love of dance and movement with their philosophy of helping people become more active and less lonely. They knew they could easily do this at a local level through dance classes but they wanted to reach more people; they wanted to “move the world”.
To achieve this the couple combined their talents and skills and founded the playful movement program, Moving Creatures. And, as the program is based online through an interactive website, Jordine and Dor can now help get everybody’s body moving without the impediment of distance or location.
With Jordine also being a registered Dance Movement Therapist, the program includes a range of movement resources to enhance physical, cognitive, social and emotional development.
Dor says being ‘playful’ is definitely at the core of Moving Creatures and that we can move together more, and move more of our body parts, through the power of play.
“The games we’ve developed create opportunities to move with others, to mirror others and become more attuned to others,” he says.
“We work with children, caregivers, professionals and communities all around the world and we know that you can develop deeper emotional connections when you let your body do the talking. We’ve also created a movement card resource so that parents and their children can connect through reciprocity; where they’re changing roles and meeting on the same level.”
Dor adds that Moving Creatures is not just for the young but also for the young at heart and that movement has immense cognitive benefits for older bodies.
“There’s a large amount of evidence-based research showing the benefits for the brain when you move, play and dance. As we age we get stuck in these cognitive grooves and through play, movement, and dance we’re able to experiment and create new pathways in our brains.
That’s why they tell elderly people to pick up and learn an instrument or learn to juggle because moving your body to learn something new is actually the best solution for the prevention of Alzheimer’s.”
Jordine and Dor will also tell you that, at the end of the day, it’s all about having fun. And let’s be honest, in this era of increased loneliness and isolation, moving together is way more fun than moving alone.
