The Alchemy of Hip-Hop

This week in Melbourne I stepped back into AmentiWorld for a five-day intensive, building on a two-day workshop I did with them earlier in the year in Perth. I already knew their work goes deep, so I wasn’t surprised by the impact, but there was something about being in the container again, with that collective, that opened a different kind of current. Before I get into my own experience, it’s worth giving a sense of who AmentiWorld actually are, because they’re not a typical movement school. They’re a community-based collective blending hip hop, Jungian psychology, somatic practice and ancient symbolic knowledge. Their approach is archetypal, elemental, embodied, and everything is done in groups because community is the architecture of the work. Movement becomes a mirror, and the body becomes a way of seeing. Nothing about it is performance, it’s psyche and soma and culture braided into one.

Stepping into that space felt like entering a lineage I didn’t realise I’d been orbiting for years. And it landed in an interesting way because on the Bibbulmun Track people know me as The Alchemist. The name stuck because hiking has always been where I explore the elements of nature and how they shape me, almost like the bush turns into an open-air laboratory. The forests, the weather, the terrain, all of it works on you in quiet, consistent ways, and walking becomes a slow act of transmutation, each step breaking something down and reshaping something else.

But this week was a completely different kind of portal. Instead of valleys and granite it was wooden floors, potent music, sweat, heat and bodies moving with intent. AmentiWorld opened the door and Gil walked me straight into initiation, not just into dance technique or choreography, but into hip hop as an elemental lineage. And that’s the part that struck me. I wasn’t learning moves. I was learning how to conjure, how to enter states, how to let movement speak from somewhere far older and grittier than thought.

The days followed the five elements. Earth as the layer of physicality, weight, shape, taking up space. Water as articulation, sensation, effort, the emotional residue living inside joints and muscle memory. Fire as direction and agency, the intensity that clarifies rather than destroys. Air as the social field and relational winds between people. Ether as imagination, symbols, the inner library. A perfect balance of theory and physicality, but never as ideas to sit with. These weren’t concepts, they were states. You stepped into them or they stepped into you.

Earth was a workout. Real grounding. Moving through space with weight in my bones, feet like drums hitting out a rhythm I could actually trust. Water opened the joints and pulled up sensation I didn’t know I’d been holding. Fire took me the furthest. Fast limbs, sharp breath, crumping patterns, grabbing, pushing, stomping, all of it anchored by that potent bass. It was dark, dirty and danky in the best possible way, and it pushed a part of me I didn’t realise was so ready to wake up. Air softened things again, reminding me that identity isn’t created alone, it’s created in the currents between people. Ether tied it all together, slow motion shapes, symbolic movement, tapping into imagination and pattern in a very grounded way.

Somewhere in the middle of all that heat and rhythm, something important switched on. Not a collapse of tension or a clean, spiritual softness, but the opposite. A permission to feel the tension that’s already there and move with it. A permission to be powerful. To move with intensity. To go fast. To stop hiding the parts of myself that feel raw or sharp or messy. It gave those edges a place to move instead of sit in my system like static.

What surprised me was how much of myself has been outside the frame of what I consider acceptable in the modern, polished world. The softer spiritual environments I spend time in have taught me a lot about stillness, but they haven’t always given much room for the darker, heavier, more chaotic parts of my expression. AmentiWorld did. Hip-hop did. The heat, the bass, the sweat, the aggression, it all made sense once I started moving inside it. I could feel parts of myself I’d sidelined, not because they were wrong but because they didn’t have anywhere to go. This week they had space.

I walked out of those five days feeling more expressive, more raw, more dark, more dingy, and a whole lot more alive. Not in a metaphorical way, in a very physical way, like my bandwidth for being a full human being just widened. My rough edges feel less like a problem now and more like fuel. The stuff creativity is born from. The stuff that gives movement its pulse.

If movement or dance or AmentiWorld are calling you in any way, or if you just have that intuitive hunch in your gut, check out their work. It is genuinely profound. Revolutionary in how it brings people back into their bodies, their power, their history, their imagination.

Massive thanks to the AmentiWorld crew. Gil, the walking hieroglyph. Alana. Kamile. Ruben. Elia and Neder. Legends. See you fellow alchemists in Bali in late January for the next round of teachings and co-creations.