Back in 2018 I read a book called Belong, which had been written by a woman named Radha Agrawal. Among many other things, Agrawal was the co-founder of an organization and movement called Daybreaker, which (at the time) had been in existence for five years and had hosted hundreds of early morning dance parties across the globe. Belong was all about helping you to find your people, and to build and nurture community. Daybreaker was the physical and sociological manifestation of those ideals.
The Daybreaker movement was built upon a set of core values that include wellness, camaraderie, self-expression, mindfulness, and mischief. Its underlying goal was to bring human beings together, in a spirit of collective joy, in an environment that fostered engagement and community. In an age where people are becoming excessively reliant upon screen time on their phones, tablets, and computers as a proxy for social engagement, Daybreaker sought to bring people together physically, to start their days off by channeling their energies through yoga, music, and dance.
As Daybreaker celebrates its tenth anniversary, its community has grown to more than 800,000 followers, spread across the globe. What started as a gathering of 180 friends in a New York coffee shop in December of 2013, has exploded to include hundreds of events in thirty-three cities across five continents. Yesterday, Daybreaker brought their celebration to the Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
In an interview I did back in February (Daybreaker Peace Tour Coming To Red Rocks In April – Interview With Founder Radha Agrawal | Denver Entertainment Hub), Agrawal told me that Daybreaker does two distinct tours, each with their own themes, each year. In 2024, those two tours are the Peace Tour, and the Purple Tour. The Peace Tour, which the event at Red Rocks was a part of, is focused on promoting peace, on the home front, across the globe, and within each of us as individuals. The Purple Tour, which will kick off in July, targets political divisiveness, and is about bringing the Red and Blue together in the spirit of unity and community.
Daybreaker events are comprised of two principal parts… a one-hour gentle yoga session, followed by a two-hour dance party. The yoga session is designed to calm and center, both physically and mentally, in preparation for the dance party. The dance party itself is pure energy, unleashed.
As the dance party winds down, participants come together for an intention setting ceremony. The idea here is to carry the joy and sense of community experienced during the event forward… into the rest of your day, week, month, etc. If you are so inclined, it’s highly likely that you’ve made a number of new connections over the course of these three hours… people you very well might continue to connect with long after the event is over.
All of this takes place in a completely sober environment, with abundant healthy beverages and snacks provided as part of the price of admission.
The Red Rocks event followed this agenda exactly as described above. On a picture-perfect Colorado spring morning, the Red Rocks Peace Tour event kicked off at just shy of a quarter past 9:00 am. Most of the approximately 3,000 participants brought their own yoga mats, which they spread out across the upper three quarters of the amphitheater’s seating area (the lower quarter was bathed in shade). Eight instructors from the Denver area CorePower Yoga studio took the stage, with Kada O’Connor at the mic, to lead the crowd through a one-hour session.
I know Red Rocks hosts Yoga on the Rocks sessions with some regularity, but this is the first time I’ve been there to witness one of them. I’ve got to tell you… it’s a darned impressive sight. If you stand down by the stage and look up through the seating area… it’s a thing of beauty. Kudos to every single person who participated.
As the CorePower Yoga team was exiting, the emcee for the next portion of the program, Elliott LaRue, came onto the stage. The music, which was provided by DJ Que, shifted from mellow background to upbeat dance, as LaRue not only beaconed the crowd to get up and dance, but invited everyone to bring the party onto the Red Rocks stage.
This certainly caught me off guard. Obviously, I knew the dance party was coming. But I had no idea that the plan was to bring as many as would fit onto the stage itself. The pure and simple joy on the faces of the participants as they made their way onto the stage and into the forming rave was completely amazing and infectious.
The party went on, with almost no slowdowns, for a solid hour and a half. What “breaks” there were came when scheduled performers took center stage… a belly dancer, and two sets of male/female floor acrobat partners.
The energy level during the dance party was unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed. Remember… it’s Sunday morning, not Saturday night. And even if it was Saturday night, you don’t see crowds of people dancing non-stop for this period of time. It was simply extraordinary.
As the party wore on, some people began to move back off the stage to take a breather sitting in the stands. But there was still plenty of dancing going on in those stands, and there remained a core of several hundred people who seemingly never left the stage. DJ Que kept the music roaring, and LaRue kept encouraging the crowd to keep on dancing.
As the clock approached noon, the music began to slow, and eventually stopped. As a bridge between the dance party and the closing rituals, a performer named Anastasia took the stage to play and sing John Lennon’s “Imagine”.
The wrap up for the morning came in two parts. First was a “moment of belonging”, where the members of the crowd were asked to find a partner, to sit down facing each other, take each other’s hands, close their eyes, and visualize a person from their life who held deep meaning to them. Then they were instructed to open their eyes, to make direct eye contact with their chosen partners, and to embrace the spirit of belonging that had been generated between the two of them.
The closing ritual at every Daybreaker event is the “intention ceremony” where everyone in the crowd reads together/aloud from a provided “intention card”. The card contains a motivational quote that sets their intentions for carrying forward, leveraging the same sense and feelings of gratitude, joy and community that have been the focus of the last three hours.
Although the bulk of the crowd appeared to be in their mid-20’s through late 30’s, there was significant representation from both much younger and much older age groups. There were plenty of kids as young as four or five, and even more kids at heart in their fifties and older. I talked to one sixty-three-year-old woman who told me she was scheduled for knee replacement surgery in May, yet here she was, dancing on the Red Rocks stage, appearing (to me) as if she didn’t have a physical care in the world.
I seriously doubt that the very young lady who was chasing bubbles (see photo gallery) was locked into the messaging of the Daybreaker movement, but I know darned well that the sixty-three-year-old was. Based on the facial expressions I saw as people were heading out of the venue, the message behind the movement had moved them in very real, personal, and meaningful ways. And for that I say, “Well done, Daybreaker”.
Story and photos by Rick Witt www.rickwittphotography.com
