THE DANCE OF THE GODS

According to Curt Sachs, in his World history of Dance 25, the oldest dance is that of the circle dance. Human beings would form a circle and dance round and round and soon become enveloped in a frenzy of emotional, mystical, and spiritual excitement (feelings mediated by the amygdala and temporal lobe). This has been referred to as the "magic circle."

The circle, thought divine by many ancient societies, was seen as magical as it is the embodiment of perfection and symmetry and is thus in harmony with the universe. The sun is round, the moon is round, and the earliest forms of magic are the circle. Hence, the circle dances were probably also danced to alter events, increase or give thanks for success of the hunt, and so on.

Thus dance over eons of time evolved beyond limbic sex and wild emotional abandon to encompass the mystical, magical, and spiritual worlds including those of the Gods and loved one's long dead. Soon, shamans, witch doctors, magicians, medicine women and men evolved and performed their dances so as to effect the audience and the unseen 26.

Indeed, dancing continues to play a significant role in the rites of many modern religions. Japanese Shinto religious dances are performed for the enjoyment of ancestors and as a means of making contact with their god. The whirling Dervishes, a religious Muslim sect, use dance ecstasy as a major element in their religious worship. So to do some Hassidim Jewish sects in which they dance in order to increase their contact with the mystical powers of god. Dancing also plays a major role in Hindu religious practices as even the Gods are known to dance.

DANCE OF ART

Magical dances and those involved in fertility rites, are not meant as a form of individual emotional expression but usually serve a particular purpose benefiting the tribe. In this regard they become ritualized and are performed in the same manner with certain proscribed and prohibited movements. Many forms of dance are in fact ritualized, including, ballet and even rock and roll. In contrast, those forms of dance which attempt to defy ritualized constraints, instead rely on natural movements and gestures which in turn are sometimes the most pregnant with individual meaning. These movements are under the auspices of the basal ganglia, which, like the limbic system, provide emotional coloring and meaning to movements. Indeed, it is via the amygdala that even spiritual feelings of the mystical come to be generated.

As dancing evolved from purely emotional to ritualized it gained in its potential power to influence and communicate beyond the natural and innate. In the evolutionary process it also became art. However, it is quite possible that dance preceded not only the more formalized means of communicating such as through spoken and written language but the development of the plastic and representational arts as well. Long before the development of visual art, dancing had already become an art as well as a later subject of ancient as well as modern artists. Hence, we find that in the earliest depictions of art in the recesses of ancient caves and beneath ancient cliffs, that Cro-Magnon man painted his fellows and the women in the act of dancing.

Be it the expression of emotion, magic, art, spirit, or soul, dancing thus represents an important form of intellectual activity. Indeed, be it modern human or dancing bee, dance is not only a language, for it speaks of the past and the future and time and space and that which is ineffable.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 801