The Elements of DanceBelow is an excerpt discussing how universal dance is (early humans danced even before they could speak with each other) and also one way of thinking about dance's fundamental elements, like turning. The excerpt is from the book "Let's Dance: Social, Ballroom and Folk Dancing," which is fairly dated but still an interesting read.
Title: Let's Dance: Social, Ballroom and Folk Dancing Author: Peter Buckman Excerpt: |
Beginnings
Apes dance. So do mountain chickens and stilt birds. That is, they perform a series of rhythmic movements, and repeat them again and again, with a purpose. They may be demonstrating admiration, desire, or territorial ownership. The dance may be a challenge, a display, or an act of worship. But the use, for communication purposes, of rhythmic body movements, measured steps, and gestures that we define as dance (movement, that is, which have nothing to do with the performance of work) appears to be older than speech itself.
Dancing is first and foremost a means of physical self-expression. The urge to coordinate movements of the body in response to some sort of rhythm - the beat of the heart, or the sound of the sea - is an inborn thing, almost beyond analysis. To begin probing such an instinct is to risk sounding mystical and pretentious. Let us rather describe what our bodies do when we dance, before considering the religious and recreational uses of dance adopted by our ancestors.
Rudolf Laban, the pioneer of modern educational dance, analyzed the five basic bodily movements that occur in dancing. The first is gesture, which is any movement not connected with supporting the body's weight. The second is stepping, which is transferring the weight from one support to another. The third is locomotion, which is simply getting the body from one place to another. The fourth is jumping, which is movement without a point of support. The fifth is turning, which is changing the position of the front. But dance, of course, does not consist simply of bodily movements. These movements are expressive of various emotions: as Laban put it, dance is "a language of action in which the various intentions and bodily mental efforts of man are arranged into coherent order." That is, when you make a wide, high, stretching gesture, you will be expressing a different emotion from that which you convey when you hunch your shoulders and concentrate on the ground beneath your feet. When you defy gravity with a jump, you experience a different sensation from that obtained by making imperceptible movements of the body in time to the music. Laban's five basic bodily movements are used in endless combinations to convey an infinite number of shifting emotions: joy, love, fear, adulation. The Whirling Dervishes of Egypt turn in place for half an hour at a time to achieve a sort of ecstasy. The couple who smooch while dancing imperceptibly in a dark corner of the floor, also for extended periods, are achieving a different sort of ecstasy. Both are examples of emotive dancing.
According to Curt Sachs, whose World History of the Dance was the first comprehensive comparative study of the subject, there is a basic cultural difference between those peoples who dance for sheer pleasure (he instances the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands) and those who do it solely to achieve a state of ectasy (the Vedda of Ceylon).
- from "Let's Dance: Social, Ballroom and Folk Dancing," by Peter Buckman
Dancing is first and foremost a means of physical self-expression. The urge to coordinate movements of the body in response to some sort of rhythm - the beat of the heart, or the sound of the sea - is an inborn thing, almost beyond analysis. To begin probing such an instinct is to risk sounding mystical and pretentious. Let us rather describe what our bodies do when we dance, before considering the religious and recreational uses of dance adopted by our ancestors.
Rudolf Laban, the pioneer of modern educational dance, analyzed the five basic bodily movements that occur in dancing. The first is gesture, which is any movement not connected with supporting the body's weight. The second is stepping, which is transferring the weight from one support to another. The third is locomotion, which is simply getting the body from one place to another. The fourth is jumping, which is movement without a point of support. The fifth is turning, which is changing the position of the front. But dance, of course, does not consist simply of bodily movements. These movements are expressive of various emotions: as Laban put it, dance is "a language of action in which the various intentions and bodily mental efforts of man are arranged into coherent order." That is, when you make a wide, high, stretching gesture, you will be expressing a different emotion from that which you convey when you hunch your shoulders and concentrate on the ground beneath your feet. When you defy gravity with a jump, you experience a different sensation from that obtained by making imperceptible movements of the body in time to the music. Laban's five basic bodily movements are used in endless combinations to convey an infinite number of shifting emotions: joy, love, fear, adulation. The Whirling Dervishes of Egypt turn in place for half an hour at a time to achieve a sort of ecstasy. The couple who smooch while dancing imperceptibly in a dark corner of the floor, also for extended periods, are achieving a different sort of ecstasy. Both are examples of emotive dancing.
According to Curt Sachs, whose World History of the Dance was the first comprehensive comparative study of the subject, there is a basic cultural difference between those peoples who dance for sheer pleasure (he instances the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands) and those who do it solely to achieve a state of ectasy (the Vedda of Ceylon).
- from "Let's Dance: Social, Ballroom and Folk Dancing," by Peter Buckman