Adam Small
I write today in praise of dancing, in appreciation of a text, I praise the Dance, compiled by Michael Britton and Kurt Egelhof. The work speaks interestingly “in celebration of contemporary dancing”.
St Augustine is quoted, praising dancing: “it frees people”. Another thought put forward is that dancing “demands a whole person, one who is firmly anchored in the centre of his life”.
With dancing come music and song, a basic definition of dancing being that it is bodily movement with rhythm, “usually in time with music”, the suggestion being that there is an inborn desire with people to express their feelings in this way.
Given the multitude of forms of dancing, it is possible to glimpse only a few.
As an art form, the dance relates to poetry and drama – and of course to philosophy. Meaningful thought cannot ignore the idea of dancing – an attribute dancing shares with thinking is universality, both in the sense that it happens everywhere as far as place is concerned and, importantly, in that it is a timeless inspiration for people to overcome sadness and woe.
“Place” – the earth under one’s feet, as in dancing – is a fundamental human concept and reality. We have previously mentioned the philosopher Heidegger, and his profound contention that “the loss of place is death”.
It may be noted that one can lose one’s place even when still living. The praise of the dance as expressed here, counterpoints in the sense that it also has a capacity for exposing fallacy: for unearthing lies and – borrowing a phrase from Gogol – showing up “dead souls”.
A case in point is the vulgar news of the moment concerning Swaziland’s reed dance, with its “topless maidens”, transported like cattle on open trucks, to dance before Mswati the king – against whom, we are told, “open criticism is unknown” in the kingdom. Any one of the girls, it is said, “stands a chance of being selected the ruler’s 15th bride”. What a hapless – evil – situation! What a disgusting abuse of children in the name of culture!
To continue: A most important fathoming of dancing is its association with worship or relationship with “God”. The dance in praise of God was well-established even before ancient Judaism, but in Judea reached a pinnacle. It promoted a feeling of unity among “God’s people”. The Bible has much to say about dancing. David joyfully “danced before the Lord”. But another face of dancing presents itself: the daughter of Herodias danced to please the lusty Herod and then, at her mother’s whim, as a prize, asked him for the head of John the Baptist.
All cultures seem steeped in dancing. Hinduism is worthy of note: one thinks of the dance of Vishnu. He is a god of kindly character, sometimes called the Preserver, who tries to promote the welfare of humankind. The god Shiva, in turn, displays a different character, and is often called the Destroyer, with “a terrifying appearance”, and he stands back from human affairs.
This “standing back” appears to be characteristic of life without dance. There is something morose about it. If we live in a world of signals (as Nietzsche thought), a “Zeichenwelt”, then withholding oneself from others’ activities signifies a withdrawal from the dance. Any appearance of dance that there might be, is falsity. Deep down, there lives a realisation that one should be participant in what happens in the world, yet there seems to be a disregard for (and of) reality, scornful and fearful at the same time. Is there something Satanic here? Satan, we are told, is “up and down” in the world, but this is negation: there is an absence of love.
Dancing clearly is a concept not to be taken literally. It has a quality of paradox, transcending mere connectedness with the earth under our feet! (My own dancing happens in my heart and head!)
We have suggested that the poetry of dancing lives in the work of great artists. It is the “force”, as Dylan Thomas says, “that through the green fuse drives the flower”; or we may think of Franz Kafka, who tells how he would step out by his front door at night, and how “the sky, with moon and stars in its great vault and the spacious square with the Town Hall, the Virgin Mary on her column, and the church overwhelmed (him)”, so that he “raised (his) hands to still the roaring of the night”. Visual art similarly reminds us of the fiery dance of the sun (Van Gogh), and Jacob Ruisdael’s or Meindert Hobbemas’s softer picturing of the dance of the air around windmills or through the tall cypress trees (the harp of the wind).
How wonderful to image dancing like this!
The poetry of the dance perhaps best exemplified in the Western world (speaking a language softer than Thomas’s driving “force” and Kafka’s “roaring of the night”) is ballet. Of Italian making, dating from as early as 1400 AD, it is all about elegance, and again there is an embeddedness with other arts: the dancing cannot do without a base of storytelling.
But ballet has not been popular everywhere in the West. American Isadora Duncan, a pioneer of modern dancing (who danced barefoot) – more in line with ideas of Thomas and Kafka – thought badly of “the formal, set movements of ballet”, and desired a freedom of movement which she thought ballet could not afford.
That was in the early 1900’s – and her ideas in fact influenced the development of ballet to greater freedom of movement.
Dancing has come a long way historically. Ancient cave art, as old at least as 20 000 years, attests to this. Religion is involved all the time, and the great happenings of life: birth, marriage, sickness, death, and mourning. At the extremities of life, dancing also presents itself as physical and spiritual therapy.
Ancient Greek culture considered dancing essential to education. Plato thought as much. The Romans followed suit. And this history continues through the time of Catherine de Medici and the great Court Balls in France during the reign of Louis XIV.
The many forms of dancing astound: the Waltz from long ago until now, Latin-American forms, Chinese, and African modes, African dancing being “nearly always a group activity”.
There are also the lonesome dancers, whose dancing is a kind of peaceful assertion of the self. This, however, easily turns into group activity again, such as happened with the Cake Walk, for instance, a satirical form of dance developed in America by slaves who, in their dancing, scoff (bitterly) at white plantation culture.
Just as dancing was practised as a counter to slavery, it was enlisted for combating even death! When, during the Middle Ages, in the 1300s, the Black Death gripped Europe, people – madly – would dance in graveyards, persuaded that this would keep death at bay! Superstition and dancing joined hands.
In line with this bleakness is the fact that religions throughout the centuries – Catholic or Protestant, Islam – mostly took a dark view of dancing as though it was something evil. This seems to have eased today, to the extent that some church fundraising is supported by dancing! As far as Islam is concerned, there, anyway, exists a divide among Muslim scholars about the cultural validity of dancing.
The problem always seems to be religionists’ anxiety about fornication as an outcome of dancing!
We end on a cheerful note. During the Renaissance, even great artists like Leonardo da Vinci participated in designing costumes and other regalia for festive events accompanied by dancing: weddings, birthdays, and the like. The joyous Maypole Dance, developed in the Middle Ages, survives to this day.
I dedicate today’s column to Natalia Da Rocha for her great work “in praise of the dance” in partnership with Kurt Egelhof.
Long live the concept of the Dance. It keeps us on our toes, thinking!