DANCE.

Dance is broadly conceived as physical movement organized into patterns in time and space. Writings on dance grounded in the European intellectual tradition have tended to distinguish dance from other systems of organized movement (such as sport, military drills, synchronized labor, festival processions, and sometimes ritual) by identifying a dimension of conscious craft or artistry. The discipline of anthropology has shown that this distinction is not universal by investigating how organized human movement functions in different cultures, as well as how it relates to music, theater, pantomime, storytelling, and other kinds of performative behavior.

Dance in Intellectual Traditions

The idea of dance varies within intellectual traditions. Two ancient treatises serve as examples. Where ideas are treated as a function of language, and knowledge is derived from analysis of phenomena, the body is often written out of epistemological projects. Aristotle's Poetics (fourth century b.c.e.), for example, analyzes the plot structure, poetry, and ethical issues presented by fifth-century Athenian tragedies. The Poetics mentions only briefly the physical movement of the tragic chorus as a contributor to the effect (emotional or intellectual) of a theatrical experience or as a component in knowledge. In contrast, where cognitive processes, observation, and abstract thinking include bodily experience, physical movement is thought to generate and represent abstract concepts. The body and corporeal experience have a more prominent place in the formation of ideas. The Indian treatise Natyasastra (c. second century b.c.e. to second century c.e.), describes in meticulous detail how correct performance of hand gestures, eye movements, posture, steps, coordination with music, and posture will affect an audience's comprehension of the narrative and its meaning.

The Poetics and Natyasastra both assume dance to be inseparable from the performance of music, theater, poetry, and dress (including masks and makeup). Both treatises also assume that performance takes place in a ritual context, where form and content are already dictated by established conventions. Even so, the relationship between movement, emotion, and cognition is conceptualized differently in each treatise, which suggests the need for continued attention to the intellectual formulations that define the interpretation of human movement.

Until relatively recently, dance has been on the margins of the modern Western intellectual tradition. Dance appears as an object of study in two particular domains of modern Western thought: aesthetic criticism and anthropology. Aesthetic criticism, emerging in eighteenth-century dictionary projects and then taking root in nineteenth-century philosophy parallel with the development of the romantic ballet, considers dance to be an artistic practice. As performance, dance is distinguished from folk, social, or ceremonial dancing (though it may represent them) and requires formal training. The idea of dance as a formalized performance tradition is usually associated with industrial economies, urban societies, and a culture's economically secure or educated classes. Appreciation of technical mastery and performance conventions is considered evidence of cultural sophistication or artistic sensibility; meaning is communicated primarily in the visual realm of symbolic representation, mimesis, and technique. Dance criticism is an intellectual project involving analysis of choreography, performers' skill, aesthetic conventions, historical developments in dance styles, innovations in genre, and the success of performances.

Aesthetic Criticism and Analysis of Culture

In dance practice, at the beginning of the twentieth century Sergey Diaghilev's (1872–1929) experimental productions with the Ballets Russes famously challenged the aesthetic sensibilities of classical ballet by introducing parallel feet, ambiguous story lines, a lowered center of gravity, and representation of "primitive" cultures. The creation of new forms of art dance, such as expressionistic modern dance in Europe after World War I and Butoh in Japan after World War II, deliberately defied ballet's conventions of beauty but stayed within the domain of artistic performance. Aesthetic criticism accounted for and dealt with the creation of new dance genres. The purpose of aesthetic criticism remains a greater understanding of established and new dance styles, choreography (recorded in notation systems such as Labanotation), individual performances, and criteria on which stage performances can be evaluated.

The emergence of anthropology as a scientific discipline in the mid-nineteenth century, parallel with aesthetic criticism's elevation of dance as an art form and tensions in experimentation with the form, expanded a Western idea of dance to non-Western cultures and societies, often treating dance practices as folk traditions. Franz Boas (1858–1942), A. R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881–1955), and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1902–1973) included social dancing, ceremonies, and rituals in their field studies. Curt Sachs's World History of the Dance (English translation, 1937) offered an evolutionary and universalizing theory of world dance forms and was followed by Franziska Boas's collection, The Function of Dance in Human Society (1944). Though guided by the scientific commitment to objectivity and evaluation of empirical data, early anthropological studies interpreted dances from non-Western cultures as less aesthetically developed than those on the European stages and presented the dance traditions of North Africa, the Middle East, India, Asia, and the Americas as more primitive forms of dance. The images provided by early anthropologists were reproduced as artifacts of exotic cultures in World's Fair exhibits and romanticized in exoticized, popular stage performances such as those of Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) and Ted Shawn (1891–1972).

Since the 1960s and 1970s, this early anthropological work on dance has been significantly revised. The idea of dance, expanded to the broader notion of movement practices, allows for greater attention to the categories that define movement systems within individual cultures, nations, or societies, as well as for comparative studies. For anthropology and its related disciplines (folklore, ethnomusicology, ethnology, and ethnography), aspects of culture are revealed in dance practices. These disciplines also look at dancing itself as a culturally constructed activity that offers information about human behavior and, by extension, culture. These interrelated disciplines, along with methods drawn from sociology, kinesthetics, and linguistics, operate with a heightened sensitivity to the imposition of Western values and desires on non-Western, indigenous, or nonindustrial cultures.

Awareness of Western ethnocentric tendencies in dance research generated different categories of analysis and new questions. Researchers began to work toward a deeper understanding of the language, customs, social structures, and modes of thinking governing localized "dance events" before attempting to interpret them. Adrienne L. Kaeppler's work on Tongan dance in the late 1970s did much to advance the study of structured human movement in a specific cultural context. In the late 1980s Paul Stoller advocated the importance of a sensual dimension in ethnographic work. Major contributors to the assessment and development of anthropological approaches to human movement in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s include Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, Anya Peterson Royce, Helen Thomas, and Judith Lynne Hanna.

The treatment of dance as a social practice and a form of expressive culture goes beyond descriptions of local customs, ceremonies, and movement idioms. Through proscribed methods of observation, data collection, documentation, interviewing, participant observation, and interpretation of data, these methods analyze how human movement relates to culture. Many studies analyze the function and meanings of dances or dancing in situated contexts. Others track changes in the performance and interpretation of dance styles such as the tango, rumba, samba, flamenco, and hula as they are transmitted across cultures, including in the inquiry of the mechanisms of transmission. Still other studies are concerned with visual and kinesthetic communication, or how dance communicates as a kind of language. Behaviors surrounding a dance performance, such as audience participation and dancers' preparation, may be as important as the performance itself. Religious beliefs, political restrictions, integration of dance with other performance forms, and vocabularies used by practitioners to describe movement are all significant to interpreting data gathered in fieldwork.

Theory and Praxis

In the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, the critical concerns of feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, new historiography, cultural studies, semiotics, race and ethnic studies, and queer theory have brought to light a wide range of issues that remain crucial in studies of dance and human movement systems, namely, how dance constructs or challenges gender and sexuality, how dance practices negotiate power relations, the effects of colonialism and cultural imperialism on dance practices, exoticization of cultural "others," institutionalization of dance practices, how dance is used to demonstrate cultural or ethnic difference, cultural ownership and authenticity of dance idioms, dance as a display of national identity, dance in marketing and tourism, the effects of stylistic hybridity on individual or group identities, performers' agency, multiple meanings in complex symbol systems, how dance practices link to social class, dance as a means of building ideological consensus, and dance as a medium of resistance and social change.

The work of scholars such as Jane Cowan, Cynthia J. Novack, Ann Daly, Sally Ann Ness, Jane C. Desmond, and Susan Leigh Foster has opened interdisciplinary territory in the effort to address these and other issues in the study of human movement in culture and as a means of cultural production. Their theoretical work has broken down the notion that Western art forms are a model of aesthetic progress. Studies of female dancers in Egypt and Morocco in the 1990s, for example, have used methods from sociology to examine performance in social conditions that define both dance and dancer. More recent attention to these concerns through ethnographic methods has shown how social control was exercised in the costuming, movements, songs, and visual spectacle in women's dances at rallies for political candidates in Malawi.

Methods of inquiry rooted in anthropology take aesthetic conventions as culturally determined rather than as marks of progress or as by-products of modernity. Aesthetics can thus serve as an entry point, whether the project is to understand culture through human movement, or human movement through culture. Applying anthropological methods to the aesthetics of classical ballet reveals, for example, that control of the body and individuality against uniformity are Western values. Cross-cultural comparisons of ballet's reception as scandalous in non-Western cultures, in contrast, show how ballet performs a desire to expose and transcend the body in contrast to local movement practices that value a body's individuality and are grounded in everyday activities. Joann Kealiinohomoku's (1983) work on ballet as ethnic dance has been followed by studies of ballet's adaptation in non-Western cultures and of how ballet choreography structures desire in its narratives.

Information made available through anthropological approaches has also led to popular appropriations of local dance forms within new cultural or social contexts. National dance troupes, such as Ballet Folklórico de México, present indigenous social dances as commercial art with aesthetic aims, often with an educational mission. Ceremonial, ritual, and communal dances may be taken out of context, adapted for the stage, and performed as a recuperation or preservation of "traditional" cultures. Scholars have interrogated the affected aesthetics, claims to national identity, and cross-cultural mis-interpretations at work in such performances. While dance forms identified with specific cultures are staged for international audiences, the same dance forms might be reinterpreted and invested with new meaning within the home culture. Kathak and Bharata Natyam as popular dance practices in India, for example, have been analyzed as resistance to the colonial legacy and as recuperation of the precolonial past. Such analyses show how adaptations of traditional dances within a culture can be used to define national, cultural, or class identity.

Reciprocity between theory and practice is evident in other areas as well. By the mid-twentieth century, ethnic fusion forms such as Afro-Cuban-jazz combined Western dance styles with those of other cultures, sometimes raising issues of cultural authenticity and appropriation. Dance forms identified with ethnicity within a dominant culture, for example African-American dance, have been analyzed as distinct and unique and, conversely, as in the process of adapting or challenging movement idioms from the dominant culture. Contemporary Western "belly dance" has been shown to remain deeply bound to nineteenth-century European Orientalist fantasies.

Dance as Experience

Though their methods, goals, and objects of inquiry differ, both aesthetic criticism and anthropology deal at some level with the fundamental question: What is being communicated, to whom, and how? This disciplinary imperative takes the human body as an agent of communication in an interpretive community or as an embodied subject acted upon by social forces. The psychological experience of dancing is generally irrelevant to aesthetic criticism's analysis of dance as a visible medium and tangential to research grounded in kinesthetics or linguistics (though audience response can be analyzed). Beyond Romanticism and notions of the sublime in art in the Western philosophical tradition, phenomenology has offered the most appropriate frame for the ephemeral qualities of human movement, as Maxine Sheets-Johnstone demonstrated in 1966. First-person descriptions of movement as a conduit for spiritual or metaphysical experience are, however, not easily adapted to Western modes of thinking and analysis, even in studies of mainstream liturgical dance.

Paranormal experiences, dissociational states, expressions of deep inner feelings, mystical experiences, and intense emotion generated by participating in a dance are usually associated with non-Western, nonindustrial, or indigenous cultures. Movement practices that produce such experiences are identified by terms such as shamanic dancing, trance dancing, exorcism, healing dance, voodoo, spirit possession, and ritual dance. In the Western stage dance tradition, such states may be represented in artistic performance, as with the expressionist choreography of Mary Wigman (1886–1973). Numerous dance forms in Western popular culture, for example Gabrielle Roth's "Ecstatic Dance," the appropriation of African dances as "healing dance," and so-called "spiritual belly dance" do emphasize altered states of consciousness and/or physical healing. Such practices—especially those that identify with practices of nonindustrial or non-Western cultures in their costuming, symbols, stories, and idioms—offer rich sources for cultural analyses. Though some work has been done to integrate experiences of altered states of consciousness into scholarly discourse, this area requires attention.

As suggested by the example of how the ancient Greek Poetics and Sanskrit Natyasastra frame dance, understandings of human movement are not uniform across cultures. In the early twenty-first century, collaboration among researchers from different intellectual traditions reveals differences in research methods, modes of interpretation, analytical vocabularies, descriptive categories, and goals in dance research. International conferences such as the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD) and the World Dance Association (WDA) insure that ongoing research will reflect a diversity of intellectual as well as movement systems.

See also Anthropology ; Cultural Studies ; Ethnography ; Theater and Performance .

bibliography

Buckland, Theresa J., ed. Dance in the Field: Theory, Methods, and Issues in Dance Ethnography. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Cowan, Jane K. Dance and the Body Politic in Northern Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Daly, Ann. Critical Gestures: Writings on Dance and Culture. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2002.

Desmond, Jane C, ed. Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press 1997.

Dils, Ann, and Ann Cooper Albright, eds. Moving History/ Dancing Cultures: A Dance History Reader. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

Foster, Susan Leigh, ed. Choreographing History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Fraleigh, Sondra Horton, and Penelope Hanstein, eds. Researching Dance: Evolving Methods of Inquiry. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999.

Hanna, Judith Lynne. Dance, Sex and Gender: Signs of Identity, Dominance, Defiance, and Desire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

Kaeppler, Adrienne L. "Dance in Anthropological Perspective." Annual Review of Anthropology 7 (1978): 31–49.

Kealiinohomoku, Joann. "An Anthropologist Looks at Ballet as a Form of Ethnic Dance." In What Is Dance? Readings in Theory and Criticism, edited by Roger Copeland and Marshall Cohen, 533–549. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Kurath, Gertrude Prokosch. "Panorama of Dance Ethnology." Current Anthropology 1 (1960): 233–254.

Ness, Sally Ann. Body, Movement and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992.

Novack, Cynthia Jean. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

Royce, Anya Peterson. The Anthropology of Dance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.

Sheets-Johnstone, Maxine. The Phenomenology of Dance. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966.

Spencer, Paul, ed. Society and the Dance: The Social Anthropology of Process and Performance. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Thomas, Helen. Dance, Modernity, and Culture: Explorations in the Sociology of Dance. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Donnalee Dox

DANCE

DANCE. The history of American dance is as varied as the numerous dance forms that compose it. Dominated by competing senses of athleticism and grace, the American dance form came of age during the twentieth century, perfecting a combination of European and African roots. In colonial America dancing was popular wherever religious sanctions did not prevent freedom of expression. Primarily primitive in nature, colonial American dance reflected the juxtaposition of numerous immigrant groups and Native American tribes. Nevertheless, it was a blending of traditional western European and western African dance forms that provided the backbone of American dance in the twenty-first century. This amalgamation began at the end of the colonial era and continued slowly until the end of the nineteenth century with the dawning of the jazz era.

From the mid-eighteenth century to the latter part of the nineteenth century, American dance progressed from minuets and country-dances to cotillions and quadrilles. These dances were almost ritualized; they required grace and knowledge of the complex steps. Regional or country-dances, such as the Irish step dances, the Scotch-Irish jigs, or German reels, reflected the cosmopolitan nature of American dance. Incorporated into this category were the various African dance forms, such as the religious ring shout, funeral and processional strut dances, and seasonal dances. Thus, American dance combined old-world technique with new environmental and social trends to create a new hybrid of dance and music.

Perhaps the best example of this hybridization is the "jig," a step dance that was popular first in Europe, and then in America. This foot-stomping dance extended beyond class boundaries and, when combined with the African step dances, became the precursor to the twentieth-century American dance form, tap. This hybridization became the hallmark of American dance, combining a sort of individualism and improvisation that was distinctly American.

Incorporating this distinctly American style was the first "ballet" style dance. Using techniques similar to pantomime, this ballet was presented in 1735 by Henry Holt, a British dancing instructor who had opened a dancing school in 1734 in Charleston, South Carolina. The first classical performers in America were English, French, and Italian touring companies, which presented operas, operettas, and pantomimes. Dancing also made its way into circuses and variety shows, where the first notable American dancer, John Durang, made his debut. As a blackface comic, he combined comedy, acting, acrobatics, and rope dancing—again, a uniquely American style. Durang began his career in Philadelphia with the Old American Company, one of the earliest theatrical touring groups. His popularity paved the way for the joint debut in Philadelphia of two American ballerinas, Augusta Maywood, who danced primarily in Europe, and Mary Ann Lee, who danced the first American Giselle in Boston in 1846. However, these dancers were exceptions, as European dancers dominated the American scene in the nineteenth century.

Theatrical dancing, including ballet, pageantry, and melodrama, peaked in 1866 with the production at Niblo's Gardens in New York of The Black Crook, which became a fixture on the American stage for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Prior to this performance, William Henry Lane, whose stage name was Master Juba, was the only black singer-dancer to perform in white minstrel shows. The ingenuity of his improvised dance steps created a sense of interaction between dancer and audience, and his footwork originated the form known as tap dance.

The cakewalk, a black American social dance, became the first indigenous African American dance fad to spread to Europe. The cakewalk presumably began around 1850 on the plantations of the South, and its high-kneed strut was meant to parody the solemn decorum of the white masters as they promenaded in the formal marches that opened their balls. The white masters, apparently oblivious to the actual meaning, encouraged the development of this dance form.

Dance became more of a public affair in the mid-nineteenth century. In the early 1800s the popularity of the waltz, an import from Europe, and round dancing, including the polka, quadrille, and mazurka brought by new waves of eastern European immigrants, reflected the new public representation of dance. More public

ballrooms were built, and dances became egalitarian events, in contrast to the smaller, more private parties of the preceding century, which had demanded a sort of ballroom etiquette. Dance manuals published in the late nineteenth century devoted less space to ballroom etiquette, and more information to the images detailing the actual dance technique itself.

At the turn of the century a rash of "animal" dances became popular. Dances like the Turkey Trot, the Kangaroo Hop, and the Grizzly Bear continued the trend in couple dances by incorporating gestures and steps from African animal dances. All body appendages could be used; elbows would flap, and heads bob, as the dancers hopped around the dance floor like bunnies. The Charleston, which had originated in black neighborhoods around 1910, made it to the white stage in Runnin' Wild in 1922. This dance craze represented a complete break from all European elements. With its African American dance elements, including the flying kicks, shimmying shoulders, and swaying hips, the Charleston made a star overseas of its protégé, Josephine Baker.

The turn of the century also inaugurated an entirely new form of dancing: the expressive or interpretive dance, known as modern dance. With the popularity of such dances as the cakewalk or the Charleston, intensity of expression became extremely important in the world of American dance. Perhaps the best-known proponent of interpretive dance was Isadora Duncan. Born in 1877 in San Francisco, California, Duncan tried the commercial stage but found it restrictive and uncreative. In 1903 in Berlin she delivered a speech entitled "The Dance of the

Future," in which she argued, "the dance of the future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, is mere merchandise." When she returned to the United States, she went where no other solo dancer had dared to go; by dancing to the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, and Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky, she transformed the public arena of the stage. Her performances were poorly received by dance critics, who questioned her physical interpretation of symphonic music, as well as her simplistic approach to costumery. Duncan sponsored many young American dancers, and trained them in her expressive, "naturalistic" style of dancing. Her uninhibited approach to art set the foundation for the success of modern dance in America.

Similarly, the uninhibited dance style of Ruth St. Denis, originally a vaudeville dancer, ignited the imagination of her followers. She became very interested in the dance of eastern cultures and, inspired by an image of the goddess Isis in an advertisement for Egyptian Deities cigarettes, created her own unique form of dance. She began her career as a solo artist in 1905 with the dance "Radha," the story of the mortal maiden loved by the god Krishna. Like Duncan, she never felt she would receive the attention she craved in the United States, so she moved to Europe, where she built her reputation as an exotic dancer with a classical style. She returned to the United States, where she began to work with Edwin Meyers "Ted" Shawn, a stage dancer who later became her husband. Together they founded the Denishawn Company, which soon dominated the modern dance arena.

One of the protégés of the Denishawn Company, Martha Graham became one of the most influential figures of the first half of the twentieth century. She learned to discard the strict choreography and footwork that had restricted her desire for innovation. She formed her own company in 1925; her programs featured exotic solos, and her dances attempted to draw attention to the plight of the human condition. She worked closely with Louis Horst, a major figure on the American dance scene in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, who encouraged her to work with contemporary composers rather than with eighteenth-and nineteenth-century music, as had previously been done. By 1930 Martha Graham had identified a method of breathing and relaxation she called "contraction and release," in which the movement originated in the tension of a contracted muscle and continued in the flow of energy released from the body as the muscle relaxed. This method gave Graham's dancers an angular look, one completely incongruous with the smooth dance styles of her predecessors. Before her death in 1991, she was often accused of making dance an "ugly" art form, but she ignited an interest in freedom of expression.

With the 1916 arrival in New York of Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, ballet actually began to be taken seriously in the United States. However, it was not until the Russian dancer George Balanchine and the American Lincoln Kirstein formed the New York City Ballet in 1948 that American ballet became a recognized and valid entity. Initially based in New York's City Center, it moved to the New York State Theater at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in 1964. Balanchine extended the range and symbolism of American ballet; by infusing traditional and classical steps with contemporary techniques and energy he created a uniquely American ballet. While the New York City Ballet attempted a return to neoclassicism, reveling in its simplicity, dancers Lucia Chase and Richard Pleasant in 1940 formed the beginnings of a company that incorporated a variety of choreographic techniques. The Ballet Theatre, which became the American Ballet Theatre in 1957, provided a stage for such works as Agnes de Mille's Fall River Legend and Antony Tudor's Romeo andJuliet, as well as for classic works of the nineteenth century such as Giselle and Swan Lake. The main focus of the American Ballet Theatre was to provide a forum for both classical and contemporary works.

Concurrently, in the post–World War II era, another group of dancers focused on choreography that emphasized idiosyncrasy and physicality, a formula that became the modern dance of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Acting independently, these were modern dance choreographers such as Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey, Glen Tetley, and José Limón. Cunningham in particular began to use chance devices to structure the movement and program the timing of movement of the performing space, which gave the dance stage a new set of possibilities. Alvin Ailey created his own touring troupe in 1958, when the idea of a modern dance company, and specifically a black modern dance company, was practically inconceivable. At the time, Broadway theaters were not hospitable to the concept of modern dance, nor were modern dance companies stable enterprises. However, Ailey encouraged the enjoyment of dance as a vibrant form of theater, and his company's style focused entirely on physicality. His dancers seemed to slide across the stage with an emphasis on ecstasy. Ailey noted that he wanted to create a black folkloric company that would combine bawdy humor, earthy emotion, and honesty with the intense physicality of pelvic thrusts and long body-lines.

New dance forms are continually evolving, particularly in terms of self-expression, thanks in part to the groundbreaking work of Martha Graham, George Balanchine, Jerome Robbins, and their contemporaries. For example, choreographer Mark Morris attempted to challenge preconceived notions, just as did his predecessors. He is perhaps best known for his 1988 work, L'Allegro, il penseroso ed il moderato, set to the Handel score. He also continued in the tradition established by Martha Graham of combining well-known composers and musicians with choreographers, working with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and composer Lou Harrison. Modern dance seeks a social context, and even ballroom dancing, which has evolved as a sport in its own right, incorporates the dances popular in the nineteenth century, such as the waltz, foxtrot, and quickstep, with a contemporary pulse.

In the latter part of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, dance acquired a sense of athleticism and was touted for its health benefits. Dancing in clubs only increased in popularity with American youth; movements are centered in pelvic rotations, swiveling hips, bobbing heads, and stomping and sliding feet. Popularized by the syncretic choreography of "boy bands" such as the Backstreet Boys and 'N Sync, popular dance was very much infused with the musical performance. The focus was as much on the music as on the choreography. Similarly, Oriental dance (commonly known as "belly dancing"), square dancing, Latin rhythms such as the merengue and samba, and such popular forms as

jazz and tap, each focus on the combination of "feeling the music" and the choreography itself. Many popular films, including Dance with Me or Center Stage, also prompted an obsession with dance in modern culture. Dance in America is closely synonymous with everyday life, and is inspired by social and cultural issues.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carbonneau, Suzanne. "Dance at the Close of the Century." USIA Electronic Journal 3, no. 1 (1998).

Cohen, Selma Jeanne. Dance as a Theatre Art: Source Readings in Dance History from 1581 to the Present. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.

Garafola, Lynn. Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Mazo, Joseph. "Ailey and Company." Horizon 27, no. 6 (1984): 18–24.

Parks, Gary. "Critical Mass: Vintage Reviews: A Look at the Dance World through Seventy Years of Dance Magazine Reviews." Dance Magazine 71, no. 6 (June 1997): 14–35.

Riis, Thomas L. Just before Jazz: Black Musical Theater in New York, 1890 to 1915. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Thorpe, Edward. Black Dance. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 1990.

JenniferHarrison

See alsoAlvin Ailey American Dance Company ; American Ballet Theatre ; Ballet ; Discos ; Martha Graham Dance Company ; New York City Ballet .

DANCE

World Leader

The 1940s were the crucial decade for American dance in this century, crystallizing the experiments of the two previous decades and establishing the dominant forms of the medium until the 1970s. It was an age of remarkable cross-fertilization. Various forms here-tofore distinct were imaginatively combined: ballet was fused with modern dance; modern dance with burlesque and vaudeville. Jazz, tap, and swing music influenced everything; popular dances and steps from Harlem nightclubs, such as the jitterbug, found their way to the performance hall and the Broadway stage. The giants of modern American dance—George Balanchine, Martha Graham, Helen Tamiris, Jerome Robbins, Agnes de Mille, Fred Astaire, and Gene Kelly—established or consolidated their reputations during the decade; classic musicals such as Oklahoma! (1943), Pal Joey (1940), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and Anchors Aweigh (1945) were scored in the 1940s. For dance it was a time of movement and sound and vigor. In the 1940s American dance perfectly reflected the ascendancy and vibrancy of America's new world leadership.

Broadway

Broadway prospered tremendously during the 1940s. During the war New York City was a magnet for off-duty servicemen, whose presence in Broadway theaters provided huge profits and whose expectations established, in a sense, the form of the stage musical for the next twenty years. In 1943 eleven million people attended Broadway shows, and they brought with them a taste for spectacle, glamour, and flash. They were not disappointed. Smash shows with patriotic themes such as Irving Berlin's This Is the Army (featuring a cast of three hundred soldiers), Winged Victory, or Something for the Boys, starring Ethel Merman, usually culminated in a high-kicking number sure to boost morale. Spectacle and all-Americanism was also the key to choreographer de Mille's hits during the 1940s: Rodeo (1942), Oklahoma!, and Fall River Legend (1947), all of which also integrated the expressionism and innovations of modern dance into a more popular setting. A similar fusion was evident in the smashes Tamiris choreographed for Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. One hit musical, On The Town (1944), established the reputation of men who would become forces in their fields in subsequent decades: choreographer Jerome Robbins, set designer Oliver Smith, and composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein. The war nurtured and promoted such talent; it helped Broad-way come of age.

Ballet

The war not only invigorated Broadway, it also brought new popularity to ballet. New York enjoyed an influx of European refugees who infused ballet in America with new energy. The Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, featuring Russian dancers, was especially popular. Ballet in New York also owed an debt to three patrons, Lucia Chase, Edward Warburg, and Lincoln Kirstein, who financed and publicized ballet and dance during the 1930s and 1940s. Chase organized the American Ballet Theater in 1939, which amassed critical support quickly, producing ballet landmarks such as Antony Tudor's Pillar of Fire (1941) and Dark Elegies (1943). Warburg and Kirstein were the chief patrons of Balanchine, a Russian choreographer brought to New York in 1933 for the express purpose of establishing an American ballet school and company. Balanchine had trained with the Imperial Ballet in Saint Petersburg before the Russian Revolution, and then, under the supervision of modern ballet master Serge Diaghilev, he spent time in Paris, integrating circus acrobatics and commercial dance styles into his choreography. Despite the help of Warburg and Kirstein, ballet was a limited financial success during the Depression, and Balanchine also worked in vaudeville, on Broadway, and in Hollywood—he even choreographed a dance for fifty elephants for the Ringling Brothers Circus (to music commissioned of Igor Stravinsky). Balanchine integrated dance movements derived from these popular idioms into ballet and gained a popular audience. In 1948, under his direction, the New York City Ballet was formed and became for many years the premier dance company in America. New York audiences during the decade were treated to numerous ballet classics, especially in the form of opera ballets: Swan Lake, Carmen, The Marriage of Figaro, La Traviata, and Don Giavanni. Balanchine achieved critical acclaim with his abstract, nonnarrative choreography for The Four Temperaments (1946, music commissioned of composer Paul Hindemith), Symphony in C (1947, to music by Maurice Ravel), and Orpheus (1948, music commissioned of Stravinsky). New York's daring integration of popular influences was perhaps best expressed in the New York City Ballet production of Stravinsky's Firebird (1949), with choreography by Balanchine and costumes by artist Marc Chagall. Colorful, dramatic, and energetic, it was an enormously popular hit and began a great period of popularity and experimentation for New York ballet in the 1950s.

Modern Dance

The indigenous American art form of modern dance achieved worldwide acclaim in the 1940s. Unlike classical ballet, modern dance was spontaneous, expressionistic, jazzy. Spurred by innovative compositions by masters such as Doris Humphrey, Graham, and Tamiris, modern dance gained a wide audience not only in the United States, but also in Europe and Latin America. Martha Graham specialized in psychoanalytically influenced studies of classical mythology and the unconscious, such as Cave of the Heart (1946), Night Journey (1947), and Herodiade (1944). Her marvelous paean to the pioneer spirit, Appalachian Spring (1944), featuring music composed by Aaron Copland, was one of the decade's artistic highlights. Humphrey took the basis of human motion, the uncertain balance between walking and falling, and constructed a rigorous dance technique around it. With her partner Charles Weidman she founded the premier modern dance company in the world and produced acclaimed pieces such as Inquest (1944), Sing Out, Sweet Land (1944), and Fables For Our Time (1947), a suite of comedies based on the writings of James Thurber. Tamiris fused the expressionism of Graham and Humphrey to the flamboyance of Broadway for her triumphs, the revival of the 1927 musical Showboat and Annie Get Your Gun (both 1946). Deeply engaged in political causes, Tamiris also choreographed an unusual Elia Kazan play, attempting to popularize meat rationing, It's Up to You (1943), and a barnstorming revue to help reelect Franklin Roosevelt, The People's Bandwagon (1944), which featured performances by actor Will Geer and folksinger Woody Guthrie.

THE FASTEST FEET IN TAP

In the 1940s tap dancing sensation Ann Miller earned a place in Ripley's Believe It or Not as the world's fastest tap dancer. In a 1942 radio broadcast her famous "machine gun" tap was clocked by a meter attached to her feet at 598 taps per minute. Four years later she broke her own record in a radio "tap-off" that pitted her against the expert typist Ruth Myers. Myers managed to put 584 taps on a page in a minute; Miller clicked her shoes 627 times.

Source:

Rusty E. Frank, Tap!: The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories, 1900-1955 (New York: Morrow, 1990).

Jazz and Tap

The 1940s were also the heyday of jazz and tap dancing. Swing music and the dances it inspired, such as the jitterbug, remained as popular as when they were introduced in the 1920s and 1930s. Urban ballrooms, such as the Roseland or the Savoy in New York, could be counted on to be packed any weekend during the war. Ballroom dancing was so popular that two thousand war plants provided dancing facilities to their employees. The big swing bands that played these clubs and rooms—Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington—featured great tap dancers such as Jimmy Slyde, Cholly and Dolly, and Peg Leg Bates as part of their revues. The Depression-era Hollywood musical got even more popular, and some of the greatest jazz, tap, and show dancing was captured on film during the decade. Top-flight dancers, such Bill Robinson, Ann Miller, Fred Astaire, and Gene Kelly, were featured in movies such as Holiday Inn (1942), Anchors Aweigh (1945), Easter Parade (1948), and On The Town (1949). Tap and show dancing were so popular, however, that even B movies were filled with toe-tapping musical numbers, especially in the "Jivin' Jacks and Jills," series, featuring young stars like Peggy Ryan and Donald O'Conner, who challenged each other to competitive dances. The competitive challenge had been brought to the silver screen from black nightclubs such as Harlem's Cotton Club, where fiery, acrobatic tappers such as the Four Step Brothers sought to outdance each other before delighted audiences. The Four Step Brothers featured the hottest tappers in the country, such as Prince Spencer and Maceo Anderson. They played radio, made films such as Greenwich Village (1944), toured America to sold out houses (including the Apollo in Harlem and Radio City Music Hall), and in 1947 stormed Europe. But tap dance was not limited to nightclubs and movies. One of the most innovative dancers of the era was Paul Draper, who tapped in symphonic halls to the music of Bach, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms, often in concert with classical harmonica player Larry Adler. Draper's work exemplified the extraordinary cross-fertilization dance experienced during the decade. Jazz, show, modern, ballet—from Balanchine to the Four Step Brothers—dance stepped lively in the 1940s.

Sources:

Agnes de Mille, America Dances (New York: Macmillan, 1980);

Rusty E. Frank, Tap: The Greatest Tap Dance Stars and Their Stories, 1900-1955 (New York: Morrow, 1990);

Margaret Lloyd, The Borzoi Book of Modern Dance (New York: Knopf, 1949);

Don McDonagh, George Balanchine (Boston: Twayne, 1983);

Moira Shearer, Balletmaster: A Dancer's View of George Balanchine (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1986).

DANCE

Dance Overview

The 1930s were a period during which America shook off European influences in order to develop its own ballet and its own modern dance, both with distinctly American themes. While Martha Graham experimented with mystical imagery, Helen Tamiris created dances based on Walt Whitman's poetry, and across the nation jitterbugs created an interracial swing subculture whose frenetic signature dance alarmed moralists.

Duncan and St. Denis

Until Ruth St. Denis and her husband, Ted Shawn, formed their Denishawn dance company in 1915 in Los Angeles, Americans had to rely on European touring companies for their dance. In fact, both St. Denis and Isadora Duncan got their starts in theatrical productions and danced extensively in Europe before coming back to the United States. Duncan's influence sprang in large part from her image, which was one of unfettered sexuality. She derived her plots from classical sources, but she appeared on stage barefoot and in loose clothing. St. Denis and Shawn, along with Duncan, appealed to those progressives who wished to break loose from the shackles of Puritanism: their ambiguous sexuality and their combining of orientalist and athletic traditions helped them to create a dance that was distinctly American. By stretching the rules of ballet until they were close to breaking, St. Denis and Shawn helped create what became known as modern dance. Moreover, St. Denis and Shawn are important not only for what they themselves did but for the dancers they spawned.

Passing the Torch

Although Martha Graham did not even begin her dance training until 1916, when she was twenty-two, by the mid 1930s she had become perhaps the most influential choreographer in America, a position she retained throughout her lifetime. Indeed, three-quarters of her company members since the early 1930s have become choreographers. Inspired by the self-consciously exotic performance of St. Denis, whose pieces bore titles such as The Veil of Isis, Incense, Radha, and Yogi, Graham began her formal dance training at the Denishawn academy. Her first star performance was in Xochitl (1920), a ballet set centuries in the past, concerning a Toltec girl, written for her by Shawn. It was also here that she would forge a lasting romantic and professional link with Louis Horst, the married composer and musical director of the Denishawn dance company, who was to remain one of her greatest artistic influences. Although she had broken from St. Denis and Shawn and was beginning to shed the exotic, romantic style promoted by Denishawn, Graham's first pieces still bore titles such as Flute of Krishna (1926) and Three Gopi Maidens (1926). Many works choreographed in the period from 1926 to the mid 1930s resembled those in the repertory of the more innovative ballet companies of the time; the group dance Primitive Mysteries (1931) is still hailed as a masterpiece. By this point she had already developed her signature spiral movements and linear stage patterns.

The Dance Repertory Theatre

In 1930 Graham, Tamiris, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weldman formed the Dance Repertory Theatre, whose stated goal was to develop dance as an American art, one that would have a less polished texture than European ballet, one that would express the raw energy of the nation. As Graham said, "A new vitality is possessing us. No art can live and pass untouched through such a vital period as we are now experiencing." Gone would be the lavish costumes, fancy scenery, and timeless, storybook themes favored by Anna Pavlova and Duncan; instead, the work would take place on a bare stage and would center on themes of modern life, social injustice, nature, and relationships between the sexes. This new dance, called "modern dance," would be punctuated by "America's great gift to the arts … rhythm: rich, full, unabashed, virile." Starting in 1934 this collaboration would be furthered by the participation of Graham, Doris Weidman, and Charles Humphrey, and choreographer Hanya Holm, in five summers at Bennington College's School of the Dance, which enabled the pioneers to teach their method to a new generation of dancers. Dance Repertory Theatre pieces tended to emphasize the country's past as well as to describe the current scene, as witnessed by such productions as Humphrey's American Holiday; Weidman's American Saga, a dramatization of the Paul Bunyan legend; and Graham's American Document.

From Mysticism to Social Consciousness

While Graham experimented with orientalist and Jungian imagery, choreographer Tamiris focused on social problems in her dance pieces. As the head of the Federal Theatre Project's New York-based Dance Project, Tamiris was responsible for a wide range of productions on American themes, including Walt Whitman's Salut au Monde (1936), the Living Newpaper One-Third of a Nation (1937), and perhaps her most famous piece, How Long Brethren (1937), her dance dramatization of Lawrence Gelert's African American Songs of Protest. Tamiris combined elements of modernism and popular culture to create dance pieces that would be accessible to a mass audience and pack a political wallop.

Americanism

As Horst said, "The artist is always a radical. If he is an artist he is progressive and if he is progressive he must break with tradition. All great art contains an element of social criticism, for it expresses the life of its time." This attitude was reflected in Graham's more-documentary work in the late 1930s. While her work in the 1920s and early 1930s was far from political, with her pre-1934 pieces typically bearing titles such as "Adolescence," "Ekstasis," and "Four Insincerities," in the period from 1935 to 1940 fully three-quarters of her work was based on American themes or dealt with the political situation abroad. Perhaps her most representative work of this period was the highly acclaimed American Document, a ballet that reviewed the country's past, incorporating such documents as the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. One of the ballet's five sections, titled Puritan Episode, used the modernist technique of collage in its juxtaposition of readings from Jonathan Edwards and the Song of Songs. Other Graham works of the 1930s included American Provincials (1934), the anti-fascist Deep Song (1937), and American Lyric (1938). Although from a slightly later period, one of Graham's most acclaimed works, Appalachian Spring (1944), with music composed by Aaron Copland, belongs to this group of dances.

The New Ballet

Although many critics, including the influential John Martin of The New York Times, rejected ballet as being academic and, worse, representing European cultural dominance, ballet in the 1930s was given a distinctively American slant by a young department-store heir named Lincoln Kirstein, creator of the American Ballet Company. The company, founded in 1934, had as its aim the development of a uniquely American form of ballet, one which incorporated both traditional elements and popular music, notably ragtime and swing. The success of its early productions moved the Metropolitan Opera to adopt the American Ballet Company as its official ballet. Although that connection was broken in 1938, and although the company had practically ceased to exist by 1940, Kirstein had by that point founded the Ballet Caravan, which performed such American-themed works as Pocahontas (1936) and Filling Station (1938).

Jitterbugging

With the swing craze that swept the nation in the 1930s came the advent of a new dance, the jitterbug. Swing fans themselves became known as jitter-bugs, or alligators, and their dance inspired the condemnation of moralists and jazz musicians. As Benny Goodman recalled, "The bugs, literally glued to the music, would shake like St. Vitus with the itch. Their eyes popped, their heads pecked, their feet tapped out the time, arms jerked to the rhythm." Psychiatrists worried about the appearance of mass hysteria and the resulting loss of inhibitions: jitterbugging was banned in some midwestern dance halls by 1939. Jitterbugging was an interracial phenomenon, though the skilled dancers whose intricate and innovative steps incorporated more acrobatic variations with each passing year tended to be black and to congregate in urban ballrooms. By contrast, the high-school-and collegeaged white jitterbugs often demonstrated more enthusiasm than skill and annoyed musicians by applauding at the wrong moments: these belonged to the group dismissed as "ickies," With the end of Prohibition, dance clubs, at least in large cities, became more respectable, were more racially integrated, and began to attract a wider range of classes and ages. At the height of the swing craze, in 1938, it sometimes seemed as though all America was dancing—frenetically, energetically, intricately—in a style that an earlier generation found virtually unrecognizable.

Sources:

Charles C. Alexander, Here the Country Lies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980);

Merle Armitage, ed., Martha Graham: The Early Years (New York: Da Capo Press, 1978);

Hallie Flanagan, Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1940);

Ernestine Stodelle, Deep Song: The Dance Story of Martha Graham (New York: Macmillan, 1984);

William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973);

David W. Stowe, Swing Changes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).

dance Like ‘body’, dance's meanings and functions have been constituted differently at distinct moments in history. Louis XIV, for example, asserted that dance provides the ideal bodily preparation for the warrior, imparting the agility and adeptness necessary for effective combat. The British sexologist Havelock Ellis identified dance as the consummate elaboration of the sexual impulse, evident in the behaviour of a wide variety of species. The American choreographer Martha Graham described dance as the truthful expression of the psyche's deepest feelings, revealing through the body's movement the innermost impulses of the human soul. The dance anthropologist Joann Kealiinohomoku, having noted the marked differences in dictionary definitions of dance during the twentieth century, offered the following definition:
Dance is a transient mode of expression, performed in a given form and style by the human body moving in space. Dance occurs through purposefully selected and controlled rhythmic movements; the resulting phenomenon is recognized as dance both by the performer and the observing members of a given group.

If dance has been construed as fulfilling a variety of expressive and social functions, histories of dance have likewise been structured around distinctive conceptions of dance, reflecting in both their organization and choice of subject matter specific notions of dance's meaning. Dance, they assert, has evolved from sacred to profane, or from ritual to spectacle, or from communal play to individual discovery. What seems clear at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the historical and cultural specificity of each of these claims. The following comments, therefore, reflect this author's and this moment's assessment of dance's significance. For who can say how the meaning of dance might change for those who pass their time absorbed in the virtual technologies that the future promises to offer us?

Dance provides a rare opportunity to experience body as both functional and symbolic. While dancing, the individual is embroiled in body as the creative producer of ‘ideas’, as a medium for communicating ideas, and as the disciplined executant of those ideas. Ideas generated by the dancing body can include images of physical identity, such as a body's characteristic postures, stances, or gestures, or they might include physical representations of thoughts, feelings, moods, intuitions, or impulses. Ideas issuing from the dancing body also consist in pronouncements about its nature — its shapes, its differentiation of body parts or regions, its rhythms, and its tensile qualities of motion — as it negotiates its surroundings and the force of gravity, and as it encounters other bodies. Through the articulation of these ideas, dance both reproduces and generates key cultural values.

Bodies engaged in dancing typically learn a dance — the orchestrated movement patterns known as the choreography — and they also learn to perform the dance, according to the criteria of proper performance of the movement patterns. Both the dance's choreography and performance resonate strongly with more general cultural concerns. Ballet, as practised in Europe and the US, emphasizes the abstract geometry of bodily form exploring the heights and extensions the body can achieve both on the floor and in the air. It constructs unique roles for male and female performers who work together to create a unified whole. Ballet recognizes a hierarchy of skills and physical prowess, and commemorates that hierarchy in the arrangements of soloists and corps de ballet. At the same time, the dancers are asked to mask the extraordinary labour entailed by their bodily elevations, and to make their jumps, balances, and turns appear effortless. In contrast, the West African dance repertoire elaborates a vital connection to earth. Its dances display the capacity of the body to engage in multiple rhythmic patterns simultaneously and to move among different rhythmic structures. It also offers opportunities for improvised dialogue between dancers and musicians. The large number of dances in this tradition, performed at a range of social and religious occasions, provide numerous opportunities for non-professional dancers to participate. In each of these cultural contexts, dance works to illuminate attitudes toward the body and to exemplify patterns of physicalized sociability through which all bodies relate.

Many dance forms require extensive bodily training in order to attain competence at performance. Pedagogies of dance training typically engage the body in extended repetition of movement sequences. These exercises may be taken directly from specific dances or they may consist of sequences that are especially designed to enhance flexibility, strength, endurance, co-ordination, dexterity, or other physical attributes deemed necessary for successful performance. Each of these training programmes produces a body with distinct capacities and limitations. In ballet, exercises develop the musculature so as to construct ideal lines for arms, legs, and torso, which the choreography then displays. In West African dance, practice is required to learn rhythmic acuity and to extend the body's endurance and its capacity to articulate complex rhythms. For Tongan choreography, dancers work to acquire an articulateness of hands and arms, and a cordial relationship between gesturing appendages and central body, in keeping with the overall aesthetic demands of that form. Bodily competence in each of these forms is highly distinctive, and only rarely can a dancer adapt the training from one tradition for use in a different form.

Through the process of learning to dance, the body is made over into the kind of medium of expression required for a given dance form. The dancer extends and alters the body's physical capacities, and, also, the dancer develops a new symbolic conception of body, of what and how it means. The early modern dancer Isadora Duncan established the diaphragm as the central source of bodily movement and as the place that connected body with soul. In contrast, the Argentine tango locates bodily centre and the source of movement in the constantly changing interplay between male and female partners. The eighteenth-century ballet theorist Jean Georges Noverre asserted that the face provided a window onto the soul, but that the bottom of the foot offered the key to balance and postural alignment. Dance training inculcates the symbolic interpretation of body as well as the patterned movement responses required by a given form. As these examples demonstrate, there are as many distinct conceptions of body and mappings of bodily meaning as there are dance forms.

Dance provides a vision of what it is to be a body for those who watch it, and an experience of being a body for those who do it. Dance connects this corporeal identity to subjectivity and sociality, so that the dancing body achieves a locatedness in relation to self and others. Dance's transcendent power stems, in part, from just this ability to synthesize physicality with individual, gendered, ethnic, and social identities. At the same time, dance places this experience of identity in motion so that the dancing body comprehends the transitoriness of each moment and its changing relation to the flux of the world.

Susan Foster

dance [Old High Ger. danson =to drag, stretch], the art of precise, expressive, and graceful human movement, traditionally, but not necessarily, performed in accord with musical accompaniment. Dancing developed as a natural expression of united feeling and action.

The Origins of Dance

The earliest history of human dance is a continuing mystery. From the evidence of illustrated ceramic fragments, some archaeologists have speculated that dance originated some 5,000 to 9,000 years ago in early agricultural cultures located in a swath running from modern Pakistan to the Danube basin. Others, however, have expressed caution regarding the reconstruction of social behavior from such sources. Speculation aside, specific knowledge of prehistoric dances is lacking, and thus many experts have extrapolated dance history from the preserved ritual dances of various preliterate societies.

Ritualistic and Ceremonial Dance

Native American dances illustrate most of the purposes of dance that is of a ritualistic or ceremonial nature: the war dance, expressing prayer for success and thanksgiving for victory; the dance of exorcism or healing, performed by shamans to drive out evil spirits; the dance of invocation, calling on the gods for help in farming, hunting, the fertility of human beings and animals, and other tribal concerns; initiation dances for secret societies; mimetic dances, illustrating events in tribal history, legend, or mythology; dances representing cosmic processes; and, more rarely, the dance of courtship, an invocation for success in love. The dance of religious ecstasy, in which hypnotic or trancelike states are induced (a characteristic phenomenon of Southeast Asia and Africa), was represented in America by the remarkable Ghost Dance .

Native American dancing is always performed on the feet, but in many islands of the Pacific and in Asia some of the dances are performed in a sitting posture, with only the hands, arms, and upper parts of the body used. Ancient Egyptian dances, often of a religious character, were derived from earlier African forms. In Greece the choral dance in honor of Dionysus played a part in the development of the drama and in religious worship. Many early religious or celebratory dances have survived in the folk dance of modern times.

In India dance and drama have usually been related, both generally having religious significance. An elaborate code of movements of the arms and hands (mudras), expressive use of the face and especially of the eyes, and a sinuous posturing of the body are important features of Indian classical dancing, among the best-known examples being Kathakali and the Bharata Natyam, both of S India. The early dances of Japan, probably influenced by ancient Chinese forms, became institutionalized with the establishment of a national school of dancing in the 14th cent. Soon the dance became associated with the famous No drama (see Asian drama ). Secular dances are performed by the geisha.

The Development of Dance in Europe

In medieval Europe the repeated outbreaks of dance mania, a form of mass hysteria sometimes caused by religious frenzy and usually associated with epidemics of bubonic plague, are reflected in the allegory of the dance of death (see Death, Dance of ). Dancing as a social activity and a form of entertainment is of relatively recent origin. During the Middle Ages, especially in France, dancing was a feature of the more enlightened and convivial courts. Some medieval dances, such as the volta, precursor of the waltz, became the sources of modern dance steps. In the 16th cent. two types of dance were popular, the solemn and stately dances performed at the court of Charles IX and the lively peasant dances.

The ballet first appeared in Italian courts in the 16th cent., and it became popular in France, especially during the reign of Louis XIV. Among the formal dances of the 17th cent. were the courante, saraband , pavan, minuet , gavotte , quadrille (or contredanse), and cotillion. Music, which had developed to accompany dancing, had, by this time, evolved many forms and rhythms no longer associated with the dance. French dances made their way to England in the 17th cent. where variations of the morris dance were frequently performed in villages and small towns.

Popular national dances include the mazurka and polonaise from Poland; the czardas from Hungary; the fandango , bolero , seguidilla, and flamenco from Spain; the tarantella and saltarello from Italy; the waltz and galop from Germany; the polka and schottische from Bohemia; the strathspey and Highland fling from Scotland; the hornpipe from England; and the jig from Ireland.

Dance in the Americas

The United States initiated the barn dance, Virginia reel, clog dance, cakewalk, and Paul Jones in the 19th cent., the two-step c.1890, the turkey trot (one-step) c.1900, and the fox-trot c.1912. The popularity of jazz in the early 1920s produced a number of new social dances, of which the most popular was the charleston . From South America came the Argentine tango and the Brazilian maxixe and samba; from Cuba, the rumba, conga, and mambo.

Since the 1920s the United States has seen a wave of dance crazes, among them the Lindy Hop of the 1930s, the boogie woogie and jitterbug of the 1940s, the cha cha and rock 'n' roll of the 1950s, the twist, frug, and various frenzied discothèque and go-go dances of the 1960s, the disco dances of the 1970s, and in the 1980s hip-hop, which was tied to rap music and evolved into an energetic style of street dancing, called break dancing. Tap dancing and ballroom and adagio dancing have won wide popularity as entertainment and have been featured frequently in musical stage shows and movies.

See also modern dance .

Bibliography

See L. Kirstein, Book of the Dance (rev. ed. 1942); C. Sachs, World History of the Dance (tr. 1937, repr. 1963); W. Sorell, The Dance through the Ages (1967); A. Chujoy and P. W. Manchester, ed., The Dance Encyclopedia (rev. ed. 1967); W. Terry, The Dance in America (rev. ed. 1971); G. Vuillier, A History of Dancing from the Earliest Ages to Our Own Time (1898, repr. 1973); P. Magriel, Chronicles of the American Dance (1978); J. H. Mazo, Prime Movers (1977, repr. 1983); F. Bijester, Dancing Is Pleasure for Two: The Story of Ballroom and Social Dance (1985); S. Barnes, Terpsichore in Sneakers: Post-Modern Dance (1987); S. J. Cohen, ed., International Encyclopedia of Dance (6 vol., 1998); D. Craine and J Mackrell, Oxford Dictionary of Dance (2000); N. Reynolds and M. McCormick, No Fixed Points: Dance in the Twentieth Century (2003).

DANCE

Ballet

Patrons of professional ballet in the early decades of the twentieth century tended toward a view of culture as a European import. At its best, American ballet was ardently derivative; resident companies hardly existed outside the major cities, and much of what little professional dancing was accessible to the public was both imported and of poor quality. Ballet schools were numerous—then, as now, ballet being considered an appropriate physical activity for young ladies. (The art of American modern dance would scarcely exist without the opportunity provided by regional ballet schools for early exposure to performance dance.)

Popular Dance

The state of popular professional dancing at the time was no better. Modern-dance pioneer Ted Shawn, describing the situation that existed in his youth, said, "Dancers in musicals kicked 16 to the right,16 to the left and kicked the backs of their heads. In vaudeville you had the soft shoe, the sand shuffle and the buck and wing."

Denishawn

The Denishawn School of Dance, founded in Los Angeles in 1915 by Ruth St. Denis (1878?-1968) and her newlywed husband, Shawn (1891-1972), reached the height of its considerable popularity in 1925. American modern dance emerged from the Denishawn company with the work of alumnae Martha Graham (1893-1991) and Doris Humphrey (1895-1958)in the late 1920s. Characteristics of modernism in dance include the discarding of shoes; unrealistic distortion of the body for purposes of emotional expressiveness rather than unrealistic elongation for elegance of line; homage to, rather than defiance of, gravity; suppression of personality (protagonists having designations like "One Who Seeks" rather than names like "Clara" or "Giselle"); and inspiration from primitive, exotic, or ancient cultures rather than European fairy tales.

Graham and Humphrey

Graham would become the most honored figure in American dance with her tension-filled, dynamic choreography created to "chart the graph of the heart." After seven years with Denishawn, she formed her own company and in 1929, three years after her first independent concert, presented her first distinctive and fully developed work, Heretic, in New York City with a group of fifteen other well-disciplined and identical-appearing dancers. Humphrey was with Denishawn eleven years, taking part in the company's 1925 tour of Asia. Less widely known than Graham, she is considered the greater choreographer by some critics and dancers.

THE CHARLESTON

The Charleston dance step, permanently identified with the ebullience of the 1920s, was introduced in Runnin' Wild, an all-black 1923 show. The song "Charleston," by James P. Johnson and Cecil Mack, was supposedly inspired by the movements of black dancers in Charleston, South Carolina. The Charleston is a comic, sexy dance, adaptable to solo performance or chorus line. Danced by couples, it is synchronized rather than intimate. It is fast-paced and jerky of movement, performed with angled limbs and making frequent use of a buttocks-projecting semisquat. The feet rapidly alternate between heels-together/toes-together positions; the bent knees move in opposition; the splayed hands, moving in opposition or parallel, sometimes describe arcs in the air, palms forward and wrists extended, forearms pivoting from bent elbows, and sometimes shift back and forth from knee to opposite knee. It is a dance that displays the form of the body because it requires unconfining clothing, and if the woman performer is wearing the appropriate flapper attire, with rolled stockings and a short skirt constructed of beaded fringe, it displays a heretofore unprecedented expanse of bare thigh. But it is not a dance of erotic invitation; the effect is cheerfully—even innocently—impudent. The Charleston created a dance craze and an epidemic of Charleston contests. A 1924 Charleston marathon at the Rose-land Ballroom in New York lasted for twenty-four hours.

The Charleston probably provoked another athletic dance of the decade, the Black Bottom, introduced by Ann Pennington ("The Girl With the Dimpled Knees") in the George White Scandals of 1926. The song was by B. G. DeSylva, Ray Henderson, and Lew Brown, The name of the dance referred to muddy river bottoms, but it was susceptible to other interpretations.

Source:

Walter Terry, The Dance inAmenca (New York: Harper, 1956).

dance, spontaneous or choreographed, may take a wide variety of forms and serve many functions. As the early Christian church's attitude was ambivalent, many old ritual dances (such as those associated with maypoles) became disguised through new names and contexts, evolving into social dance or absorbed into later theatrical spectacle. The emergence of noble and peasant classes further contributed to the development of social dance: chivalric culture encouraged stately movement, accompanied by instruments such as lutes, while boisterous, rustic figure-dances were accompanied by singing. France's lead in court dance yielded to Renaissance Italy's developments, and the upper classes of early Tudor England were soon familiar with these fashionable new forms; pageants meanwhile developed into masques, which could range from simple dances with masks to elaborate entertainments with songs and speech. A new liveliness (typified by the jig) then emerged, encouraged by Elizabeth I, and dancing schools so flourished as to prompt ambassadorial comment about ‘the dancing English’. Puritan disapproval failed to suppress the popularity of dance, and John Playford's The English Dancing Master (1651), which ran to 18 editions in 80 years, eventually included 900 choral dances of rustic origins.

After 1700, ballet (formalized by the French) became increasingly confined to highly trained specialists, on stage rather than floor, while former open-air choral dances moved indoors, executed by all classes, and seen as contributing to general education and manners. Jane Austen fully appreciated the role of assemblies and balls in the marriage-market. David Dale's view of dancing—‘most favourable for [workers'] spirits, and a strong source of attachment to the works’ (1812)—was adopted by Owen at New Lanark, where drill, team dancing, and community singing were utilized to control incipient lawlessness. Public ballrooms multiplied in the 19th cent., when the waltz gained international popularity, despite some moral disapproval of such paired dancing. The 20th cent. saw renewed interest in folk dance (morris dancing, now considered a survival from a primitive religious cult; Cecil Sharpe's collections) and search for new forms. England became arbiter of taste for these novelties, Victor Sylvester's Modern Ballroom Dancing (1928) a handbook for the dancing world, and dance competitions emerged. The advent of radio, gramophone, then electronics, expanded recreational dancing everywhere, from Scottish reels to jazz-based dances without physical contact, rock 'n' roll, disco, and break-dancing. Ballet meantime had generally dissociated itself from opera, and begun to experiment with choreography. Theatrical dance continues to flourish and influence ice-skating, women's gymnastics, and synchronized swimming.

A. S. Hargreaves

dance. In every age and among every race dancing has existed either as recreation or as a religious manifestation or as both.

In Europe all countries have their traditional (‘folk’) dances. Those of England are numerous, falling into three classes—for men alone the Sword Dance and the Morris Dances and for men and women together the Country Dances.

There has always been a tendency for some peasant dances to pass into wider use, their steps and music then becoming sophisticated. Some typical examples are allemande, bergomask, bourrée, branle, canaries, chaconne and passacaglia, courante, dump, gavotte, hay, jig, minuet, passamezzo, passepied, pavan and galliard, rigaudon, sarabande, volta. The rhythms and styles of some of the above, from the 16th cent. onwards, supplied conventional models for instrumental compositions (see suite). The Dances later popular in social circles (some of them of rustic origin) were the minuet and the Eng. country dance (17th cent.); cotillon and écossaise (18th cent.); waltz, quadrille, polka, schottische, mazurka, barn dance (19th cent.); and some of these also were taken as models by instrumental composers.

In the 20th cent. the dance has become synonymous with ballet, but the pattern of previous centuries has continued and modern dances such as the foxtrot, quickstep, and rumba have influenced composers. Dance companies such as those of Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham in the USA have been of significant importance. Dance has also been harnessed to electronic mus. See ballet.

Dance. Like all pervasive religious behaviours, the dominant importance of dance in religious and especially ritual behaviours can be traced back to its genetic role (see Introduction and BIOGENETIC STRUCTURALISM). Dance, by its rhythm and exclusion of other external stimuli, induces brain behaviours (often leading to trance or ecstasy) which underlie claims to shamanistic or divine possession. At the least, they become evidence of connection with the divine (e.g. dervishes/derwīsh, ḥasidic dancers), or of a manifestation of the divine (e.g. in Hindu temple dance). Among Hindus, dance reiterates the cosmic process, epitomized in Śiva, who, as Naṭarāja, the Lord of the Dance, is the patron of dancers, creating, sustaining, destroying, and bringing to birth. Much Hindu dance draws on the Nāṭya Śastra (c.1st cent. BCE or CE), which lays out the rules for the dramatic manifestation of the divine. Kathak (teller of tales) is an example in N. India, which syncretizes elements from Islam. Kathākali (story-tale) occurs at Kerala in S. India, drawing on the epics. The vernacular nāc (for nāṭya) gave rise to the Eng. ‘nautch dancers’. Kṛṣṇa's dance among the gōpīs is reflected in dance in honour of Kṛṣṇa (e.g. Caitanya), visible in the streets today in the Hare Krishna (International Society …) movement. See also GHOST DANCE; DENGAKU.

dance / dans/ • v. [intr.] 1. move rhythmically to music, typically following a set sequence of steps. ∎  [tr.] perform (a particular dance or a role in a ballet): they danced a tango. ∎  [tr.] lead (someone) in a particular direction while dancing: I danced her out of the room. 2. (of a person) move in a quick and lively way: Sheila danced in gaily. ∎  move up and down lightly and quickly: midges danced over the stream. ∎  (of someone's eyes) sparkle brightly with pleasure or excitement. • n. a series of movements that match the speed and rhythm of a piece of music. ∎  a particular sequence of steps and movements constituting a particular form of dancing. ∎  steps and movements of this type considered as an activity or art form. ∎  a social gathering at which people dance. ∎  a set of lively movements resembling a dance: he gesticulated comically and did a little dance. ∎  a piece of music for dancing to. ∎  (also dance music) music for dancing to, esp. in a nightclub. ∎  a set of stylized movements performed by certain animals. DERIVATIVES: dance·a·bil·i·ty n. dance·a·ble adj.

152. Dance

1. Carmichael, Essie untalented girl who goes into her ballet routine with little or no encouragement. [Am. Drama: Kaufman and Hart You Can’t Take It with You in Hart, 955]
2. Esmerelda gypsy girl whose street dancing captivates onlookers. [Fr. Lit.: Victor Hugo The Hunchback of Notre Dame ]
3. “Red Shoes, The” bewitched shoes force Karen to dance unceasingly. [Danish Lit.: Andersen “The Red Shoes” in Magill II, 27]
4. Rockettes precision dancers; a fixture at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. [Am. Dance: Payton, 576]
5. Roseland Ballroom New York dance hall. [Pop. Culture: Misc.]
6. Salome danced to obtain head of John the Baptist. [N.T.: Matthew 14:6–11]
7. St. Denis, Ruth, and Ted Shawn (1877–1968) (1891–1972) husband-and-wife team, founders of Denishawn dance schools. [Am. Dance: NCE, 2395]
8. Terpsichore muse of dancing. [Gk. Myth.: Brewer Dictionary, 849]
9. Vitus, St. patron saint of dancers. [Christian Hagiog: Saints and Festivals, 291]
10. Ziegfeld Follies beautiful dancing girls highlighted annual musical revue on Broadway (1907–1931). [Am. Theater: NCE, 3045]

dance Ancient art of ordered, stylized body movements, normally performed to the accompaniment of music or voices. In its most primitive form, dance was probably part of courtship and religious ritual. In China, Japan, and India, graceful mime is the distinctive feature, whereas the dances of Africa are characterized by rapid, athletic movements. In 18th-century Europe, Bach and Handel, among others, composed music for formal courtly dances, such as the gavotte and minuet. Ballroom dances, such as the waltz, foxtrot, tango and quickstep, became popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1950s, dances such as the jive and the twist were introduced. Many different styles have emerged from modern dance. See also ballet

dance dance attendance on do one's utmost to please someone by attending to all their requests.
dance of death a medieval allegorical representation in which a personified Death leads people to the grave, designed to emphasize the equality of all before death (see also danse macabre).
dance to someone's tune comply completely with someone's demands.
lead someone a merry dance cause someone a great deal of trouble or worry.
they that dance must pay the fiddler you must be prepared to make recompense for the provision of an essential service. (Compare he who pays the piper calls the tune.) The saying is recorded from the mid 17th century.

See also dancing dervishes at dervish, St Vitus's dance.

dance vb. XIII. — OF. dancer, (also mod.) danser :- Rom. *dansāre, of unkn. orig.
So dance sb. XIII.

dance •askance, expanse, finance, Hans, Hanse, manse, nance, Penzance, Romance •underpants • happenstance •advance, Afrikaans, à outrance, chance, dance, enhance, entrance, faience, France, glance, lance, mischance, outdance, perchance, prance, Provence, stance, trance •nuance • tap-dance • square dance •freelance • convenance •cense, commence, common sense, condense, dense, dispense, expense, fence, hence, Hortense, immense, offence (US offense), pence, prepense, pretence (US pretense), sense, spence, suspense, tense, thence, whence •ring-fence • recompense •frankincense •chintz, convince, evince, Linz, mince, Port-au-Prince, prince, quince, rinse, since, Vince, wince •province •bonce, ensconce, nonce, ponce, response, sconce •séance • pièce de résistance •announce, bounce, denounce, flounce, fluid ounce, jounce, mispronounce, ounce, pounce, pronounce, renounce, trounce •dunce, once