A trip to a festival is a highlight of the summer for many people.
There's something absolutely magical about dancing to your favourite music in the outdoors, especially in the golden hour as the sun starts to sink lower in the sky.
It's that feeling of wave-your-hands-in-the-air-like-you-just-don't-care freedom and euphoria that Amy Woods is bringing to Norfolk's beaches and parks.
Amy has run inclusive and fun dance Groove sessions at indoor venues across the county such as village halls and community centres since 2019.
Earlier this year she got some funding from Sport England and This Girl Can to run Grooves around Dereham and Norwich alongside a cancer support charity and for young people with autism.
More recently the Groove community has moved into using silent disco headphones, which means that sessions can now be held outdoors in parks, woods and on beaches without disturbing the local wildlife.
With being out in nature proven to have a positive impact on people’s wellbeing, this was something that Amy was keen to expand into.
She moved to Gorleston earlier this year and during the summer has been holding fortnightly beach Grooves, followed by an optional swim.
Amy is also taking Groove to festivals this summer - and park Groove sessions are coming soon too.
“We gave it a go and it was so much fun. There was an extra element of freedom, because you’re outside, with the sea and expanse of sky. It was brilliant,” she says.
Amy is one half of SoulShine, a social enterprise which she founded with her friend Robyn Caston, to deliver wellbeing workshops.
“I discovered Groove because we’d received some lottery funding to deliver some wellbeing workshops and a friend of mine knew a Groove facilitator who was based in Great Yarmouth, and she wanted to offer us a Groove session, as part of the project,” Amy explains.
“I absolutely loved it, because it was just so inclusive, it was so fun. The emphasis was on that you can’t get it wrong and I felt like it really aligned with so much of all my work, which is all about empowering people in their bodies to feel good, creating a healthy body image culture and body positivity.
“So it felt like a really amazing way to share that with people - and it’s really fun to get to dance with people so it was a massive bonus.”
A recent survey by Nuffield Health discovered that 47% of the women they spoke to hadn’t taken any vigorous exercise – defined by the NHS as activities such as swimming, running or an aerobics class - in the last 12 months.
The barriers to women exercising are many and varied from finding the time to having been put off by PE lessons at school.
Amy says that the beauty of Groove is that you don’t need any dance experience to join in.
“The philosophy of Groove is that we’re united in the music and we’re united in some very simple moves, and then there’s also the invitation for people to find their own unique expression.
“There are some very basic simple moves, it’s not like a very complicated choreography or anything.
“We explore a whole different range of music so it can be very high intensity cardio, like rave or party music or disco music and there’s also funky and soul and perhaps more slow, meditative songs, so it’s a bit of a journey.
“We warm up gently, then we reach a peak where we perhaps have a bit more of a dance out, and then we bring it down and cool down and always end with stillness and breath at the end, so people can just relax and rest and soak up all that goodness that we’ve created through dancing.
“It’s like a whole process of really shaking out any stress or tension or just having some fun, and then relaxing and then the general feel is that people are relaxed and energised by the experience so at the end there’s like a shift or people feel slightly different to how they arrived.”
Amy emphasises that it’s all about being in the moment and dancing to your own beat - finding your own, well, Groove.
“There’s a big story that a lot of people carry that they’re not good at dancing, so there’s already that prejudice of ‘oh I’m just going to be rubbish at this’, so it’s really great to see people there that wouldn’t say that they’re confident dancers become free and comfortable and joyful in finding their own way to move that feels good for them,” she says.
“So there are nerves and apprehensive feelings towards dancing, especially if people haven’t tried it before, but the general feel is that people really enjoy it and it’s really inclusive so there is something for everyone. So there’s space as well if you want to really go for it and find your own expression.
“The invitation is always to move in a way that feels good for you, so there’s no pressure to follow or do a certain thing.
“It’s such a joy, such a pleasure, there is a moment that happens in a session where things just click for people, whether it’s a certain song or a certain move you can just really see that moment when they start to let go and give themselves permission to have fun and play and be curious about how it could feel to open their arms like this, or do this with their arms, it’s really great.”
As Amy explains, it’s her own personal journey that has led her to what she’s doing now.
“I studied nutrition at university and I was having my own disordered eating and body image challenges at the same time,” she says.
“There were lots of revelations around that for me and I realised that I really wanted more emphasis on emotions and the psychological reasons around our relationship with food and our bodies, so I decided to study eating psychology and I decided to become an eating psychology coach.
“I just knew that I had this message around how to create a more peaceful relationship with one’s body and learning that our bodies aren’t against us. There’s so much emphasis in our culture around appearance, so it was about helping people to shift their perspective about themselves and their bodies to a more empowered one.”
She met her business partner, Robyn, and through SoulShine they went into schools to talk about body image and confidence.
They moved into adult wellbeing workshops and ran a project called Empowered Health, which explored different kinds of being well, which included guest teachers leading sessions on topics including sound healing, aromatherapy – and Groove, which is when Amy discovered it.
“We’ve always been big on creating community and creating a space where people feel safe to be themselves and also perhaps discover ways of feeling more at home in their body,” says Amy.
“Our bodies are amazing. They do so much for us and they do their absolute best for us and we are hard wired to feel good and feel lots of things and experience lots of things, so being able to dance and move and celebrate that through music, through Groove, is just an absolute pleasure.
“Groove was like the final puzzle piece to that work because it was like we don’t really have to talk about anything, we can just dance.”
To find out about forthcoming Beach Grooves on the Norfolk coast and park sessions follow SoulShine on their Facebook page facebook.com/soulshinenorfolk
Sessions are £10, including use of headphones.
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