5Rhythms Dance · Santa Cruz, CA

The day and its worries
start to drop away.

Monday nights at The Tannery. No steps to learn, no choreography. Just the body, the music, and what becomes possible when you stop performing.

Join Monday Night Dance What is 5Rhythms?

Every Monday Night

The Monday Dance

7:00 to 9:00 PM Every Monday. Please arrive 10 minutes early to register.
Tannery Arts Center, Studio A 1060 River St, Suite 110, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
All experience levels welcome No dance background required. Just show up as you are.
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Pricing

Drop-in $25
Dance Tokens (5) $100

Cash preferred. Venmo and PayPal accepted.

A sliding scale is available. No one turned away for inability to pay. Reach out to Tom.

What Happens on the Floor

You don't learn steps here.

You walk in. The music is already moving. For the first few minutes you might feel the urge to do what you've always done: perform a little, see who's watching, find the right moves. That feeling is completely normal. It's how most of us have learned to exist in the world.

And then something shifts. The music changes, the body starts finding its own way, and the day and its stories start to drop back a little. Not because you made them. Because you stopped making something else.

The 5Rhythms practice moves through five distinct energetic states: Flowing, Staccato, Chaos, Lyrical, Stillness. Together they map the full range of how energy moves in the body and in life. Tom guides the room through this arc each week, live.

No choreography. No right way to do it. No experience required.

Learn more about the practice

"Dancing was always a place where I found freedom. The nightclubs, the youth clubs, there was always something there. The 5Rhythms gave that back. Cleanly. Without anything else needed."

Tom Truman

"What I recognized in that first workshop with Gabrielle was something sensational: a map to ecstasy. This unburdening of the mundane and entry into another state. Joy, play, dynamism, eros."

Tom Truman

Workshops & Special Events

Beyond the Monday Floor

Tom offers workshops in Santa Cruz and across the Bay Area throughout the year, deeper dives into the 5Rhythms map, held over a half-day or full day.

Wholeness Workshop

Ongoing · Santa Cruz & Sacramento

Wholeness

Tannery World Dance Studio A · Also at Centered Sacramento

A half-day exploration through the 5Rhythms map. We turn toward the simple, essential truth that we are already whole. Movement becomes a way to remember, not to perfect or perform, but to return to the body's innate intelligence.

See upcoming dates

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Tom Truman

About Tom

Certified 5Rhythms Teacher

Tom grew up in England. Dancing was freedom from the very beginning: youth clubs, new wave, Madonna, Prince. That thread led him through years of nightclubs and into a period of putting himself back together at Omega Institute in upstate New York, where a chance encounter sent him into a room with Gabrielle Roth, the creator of 5Rhythms.

He didn't do any research first. He just walked in. And something registered that he recognized from a much younger place.

He's been practicing ever since. He became a certified 5Rhythms teacher in 2016 and has held the Monday night floor in Santa Cruz for years, creating a space where the practice can do what it does, which is reveal something true.

Read Tom's full story
Dancing the Field podcast

The Podcast

Dancing the Field

Tom and Chris Cobb go long on the practice, the questions it raises, and the things that don't get said in a dance class.

Listen now