Origin of Dancing

People all over the world have been dancing perhaps from the Stone Age. The way in which people dance and their reasons for dancing tell us a great deal about their way of living and thinking.

People all over the world have been dancing perhaps from the Stone Age. There are no people who are without their dances, whether one thinks of boomerang-throwing natives in Australia or modern city dwellers with their jazz and pop dances. The way in which people dance and their reasons for dancing tell us a great deal about their way of living and thinking. Similarly the records that reveal how peoples lived and thought in the past help us to recreate a number of the ways in which they danced.

What we know about dancing through the ages is largely the result of inspired guesswork-based on our knowledge of tribal people living today, on ancient drawings and carvings, but mostly on what we know of ourselves and our feelings. Most human feelings are instincts common both to sophisticated intellectuals and to the more simple- minded, to 20th-century man and to men living 20,000 years ago.

We believe that dancing is an instinct. In other words, something within each of us makes us want to dance. We "dance with joy" if anyone brings us good news, or we "dance with pain" if we bang our thumb with a hammer. In a foreign country we wave our hands and arms in an attempt to make people understand us. It is surprising how many ideas can be expressed in this way.

The words "dance" and "dancing" come from an old German word danson, which means "to stretch." All dancing is made up of stretching and relaxing. The muscles are tensed for leaping and then relaxed as we make what we hope will be a gentle and graceful landing. But clearly dancing must be something organized: it is not enough to jump around in a state of temper, hunger, or excitement. A good answer to the question would be to say that dancing is a way of expressing one's emotions through a succession of movements disciplined by rhythm.

Before any living thing existed on earth, the universe of galaxies, stars, planets, moons, was a great rhythmic creation moving through space: planets circling their suns, moons circling their planets. On our planet, earth, the movement of the earth around the sun, and the moon around the earth, created the rhythms of day and night, of the tides.