Constellation Dance
Dance Through Ancestral and Bodily Heritage
What Is Constellation Dance?
Constellation Dance is a therapeutic practice that brings together conscious movement, live music, and work with family heritage. Through the body and intuitive dance, we enter a space of personal and systemic healing, where dance becomes a bridge to a deeper understanding of ourselves.
This method allows us to express through the body what often remains unspoken – connecting with our ancestors, the patterns that shape us, and the experiences that paved the way before us.
What Is It Used For?
Our everyday lives are often influenced by invisible forces carried through previous generations – emotional inheritance, trauma, and unresolved relationships within the family system. Constellation Dance offers an opportunity to sense and recognise these deeper layers through movement and to bring awareness, acceptance, and movement to places where there has previously been stagnation.
The body remembers what the mind forgets. Through rhythm, breath, and group dynamics, dance opens a doorway to what is inscribed within us but invisible to the eye. This approach does not seek analysis – instead, it allows inner transformation to emerge through experience.
A special dimension of the experience comes from live music, performed by Maša Ljotić Plichta using violin, voice, and various instruments. The sound is created in the moment, responding to the movement of the group and creating a powerful field that supports transformation.
Origins and Development
Constellation work is rooted in the family constellation method developed by Bert Hellinger, based on the premise that we unconsciously carry the burdens of previous generations. Sometimes we live out other people’s destinies without knowing that this inheritance is at work within us.
Over the decades, constellation work has proven highly effective in bringing awareness to these unconscious connections and restoring order within the family system. Through this approach, we come into contact with inner resources, a deep sense of belonging, and personal strength.
Constellation Dance is a natural continuation of the many years of psychotherapeutic, constellation, and dance work of its two facilitators – Maša and Marica – who have woven their own experience and knowledge of working with the body, emotions, and ancestral field into this practice.
How Is It Different from Other Forms of Dance and Movement in Therapy and from Traditional Family Constellations?
Unlike therapeutic dance practices that focus primarily on emotional expression, here movement is used as a tool for connecting with inherited patterns. There is no choreography or prescribed form – the body dances what it knows and carries through generations.
Family constellations traditionally unfold through roles and verbal work. In Constellation Dance, these roles are not spoken – they are danced. They are embodied through movement, breath, and sound. This creates a deeper, somatic experience that goes beyond words.
An additional layer of depth comes from the presence of live music, which is not played back but arises in the moment. Maša’s violin, voice, and instruments follow the participants’ processes, responding to their energy and movement and creating a field of support and sound medicine.
What Can You Expect at a Constellation Dance Session?
Participation offers an experience that unfolds in stages – from a dance warm-up and releasing the demands of everyday life, through mapping your place within the family system, to deep insights and emotional shifts through movement and music.
The group dynamic creates a sense of community, support, and belonging. No previous experience is required – all you need is a body and a willingness to give it space.
The facilitators, drawing on many years of experience, guide the process with care, intuition, and deep respect for everyone who takes part.
Who Are We?
Life brought us together through art. We met on the island of Svetac, and fate sealed our connection through becoming godmothers to each other. Since then, we have been creating our own worlds of dance and constellation work.
MARICA GRGURINOVIĆ
Counsellor in body-oriented psychotherapy; member of the teaching team at CIR INTP (Split and Sarajevo); member of the professional organisations HKPT, EABP, and EUROTAS. Theatre director and drama educator with almost 30 years of experience working with people.
Using acting techniques and drama education methods, I work on developing personal, communication, expressive, and creative capacities. I have worked in cultural management and production, and as a lecturer in performing arts at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Split.
My training includes family constellations, energy work, and Tantric and shamanic practices (International School of Temple Arts).
In my work, I bring together the knowledge and many years of experience I have gained through working with people, combining the artistic world I come from – theatre, puppetry, dance, music, and film – with embodied expression and psychotherapy.
Today I like to say that art and therapy are the two legs on which I walk through the world – and this is what I offer, with joy, humility, and deep gratitude, to every Soul that opens itself along the way: through individual work, therapy, workshops, lectures, and chance encounters.
MAŠA LJOTIĆ PLICHTA
Beyond the usual facts – born here, educated there, the standard biography – I am a seeker of magic, and my search happens through music.
After my formal academic education, an expansion in my personal growth came through playing from the soul, searching for my own expression. Somewhere along the way, I discovered how to play through other bodies, through other souls, with the help of my violin.
When I play at workshops, what I am really doing is listening and translating you and your dance into the notes of my instruments. I look forward to dancing, making music, and creating magic together.
And now for the formal part: I was born on 20 August 1986 in Niš and spent most of my life in Belgrade. I have been involved in music since early childhood, and the culmination of my formal education was at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad.
Since then, I have performed as a solo artist and with various orchestras, ensembles, and bands. Improvisation is my right hand and another name for the way I make music.
From 2018, I have been living on the island of Vis.
Do you feel called to explore your place within your family system through dance?
Check the calendar to see when the next dance session takes place and join us for this transformative dance and constellation practice.
