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dance
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What is dance in the performing arts?
Dance in the performing arts involves rhythmic body movement, usually set to music, within a space, to express ideas, emotions, or simply for enjoyment. It requires skillful performers who channel the powerful impulse to move into expressive art.
Dance is closely connected to music, design, and drama, often inseparable from them. Dramatic dance imitates emotion, character, or narrative, while formal dance emphasizes movement patterns. The relationship between dancers and spectators varies, with theater dance featuring trained professionals and distinct separation, while non-theatre dance involves participation and integration into community life.
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What are some common styles or forms of dance?
Dance has many forms and styles that can be divided into theatrical and non-theatrical. Theatrical styles include ballet, modern, and jazz. Ballet is a Western theatrical dance that has been dominant since the 17th century. Modern dance evolved in the United States and Europe in the late 19th century as a protest to balletic and interpretive dance traditions. Jazz includes a profusion of forms that accompanied the birth of jazz music from Black American society.
Non-theatrical styles include folk and social dance. Folk dances developed from older tribal dance forms and often retain their original significance. Social dances include forms such as ballroom, the Charleston, and the twist. Hip-hop dance is a syncopated style typically performed to hip-hop music.
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How is dance used to express feelings or tell a story?
Dance serves as a powerful, nonverbal language to express feelings and tell stories. It communicates emotions directly through movements closely related to gestures of ordinary life. A dancer's leap can signify exhilaration, while a twisted body can express pain.
Cultural conventions influence expression, such as the 4,000 mudras in Indian classical dance that portray complex emotions. While dance may not communicate specific events, it conveys universal emotions more powerfully than words. Music, costumes, and masks often accompany dance to enhance its dramatic content. Rhythmic patterns in music emphasize the dance, helping dancers maintain the same beat. Choreography gathers and organizes movement into patterns, with phrases that have discernible beginnings and ends.
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What are the main roles of dancers, choreographers, and directors?
The roles of dancers, choreographers, and directors are distinct but collaborative in dance and performing arts.
- Dancers are performing artists who use their bodies as instruments to create art. They require strength, flexibility, coordination, and a strong sense of rhythm. Dancers interpret the choreography and project movement, conveying expressive qualities to the audience.
- Choreographers create and arrange dances, organizing movement into order and pattern. They may work with dancers' improvisations or devise movements before rehearsal. Choreographers draw from diverse sources, blending styles to create a characteristic movement style.
- Directors oversee stage show productions.
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How are costumes and music important in a dance performance?
Costumes and music are vital in dance performances, enhancing the overall experience for both performers and spectators.
Music is arguably the most important element, as dance rarely develops without it. The rhythm of the music dictates the rhythm of the dance, emphasizing movements and helping dancers maintain the same beat.
Costumes and visual elements amplify the qualities of dance movement, contributing to the dramatic effect and aesthetic appeal. Special clothes in ritual dances signal and preserve the sacred quality of the occasion, while in festive dances, clothes embellish the movement and heighten the atmosphere.
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How has dance changed or developed through history in different cultures?
Dance has evolved across cultures and throughout history, shaped by religious, military, and social functions.
Social and Ritualistic Shifts
Initially integral to everyday life, dance accompanied practical activities and religious rituals. As societies grew complex, dances transitioned into recreational folk expressions, retaining original motifs. Traditional dances often incorporate fertility symbols and serve as courtship displays.
Cultural and Historical Influences
Movement patterns vary across cultures due to environmental, historical, and social conditions. Events like migrations, wars, and colonialism have influenced dance styles, blending diverse patterns into new forms. This has led to the emergence of traditional, neo-traditional, and contemporary dance categories.
Modernization and Entertainment
Modern transport, communication, and media have prompted shifts towards entertainment-focused dance styles. Civic arts festivals and tourism also impact traditional dances, altering their purpose and presentation. In the Western world, dance has gained immense popularity as an art form and recreation, with revivals of various dance styles and increased research and education in the field.
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dance, is the movement of the body in a rhythmic way, usually to music and within a given space, for the purpose of expressing an idea or emotion, releasing energy, or simply taking delight in the movement itself.
Dance is a powerful impulse, but the art of dance is that impulse channeled by skillful performers into something that becomes intensely expressive and that may delight spectators who feel no wish to dance themselves. These two concepts of the art of dance—dance as a powerful impulse and dance as a skillfully choreographed art practiced largely by a professional few—are the two most important connecting ideas running through any consideration of the subject. In dance, the connection between the two concepts is stronger than in some other arts, and neither can exist without the other.
Although the above broad definition covers all forms of the art, philosophers and critics throughout history have suggested different definitions of dance that have amounted to little more than descriptions of the kind of dance with which each writer was most familiar. Thus, Aristotle’s statement in the Poetics that dance is rhythmic movement whose purpose is “to represent men’s characters as well as what they do and suffer” refers to the central role that dance played in classical Greek theatre, where the chorus through its movements reenacted the themes of the drama during lyric interludes.
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The English ballet master John Weaver, writing in 1721, argued on the other hand that “Dancing is an elegant, and regular movement, harmoniously composed of beautiful Attitudes, and contrasted graceful Posture of the Body, and parts thereof.” Weaver’s description reflects very clearly the kind of dignified and courtly movement that characterized the ballet of his time, with its highly formalized aesthetics and lack of forceful emotion. The 19th-century French dance historian Gaston Vuillier also emphasized the qualities of grace, harmony, and beauty, distinguishing “true” dance from the supposedly crude and spontaneous movements of early man:
The choreographic art . . . was probably unknown to the earlier ages of humanity. Savage man, wandering in forests, devouring the quivering flesh of his spoils, can have known nothing of those rhythmic postures which reflect sweet and caressing sensations entirely alien to his moods. The nearest approach to such must have been the leaps and bounds, the incoherent gestures, by which he expressed the joys and furies of his brutal life.
John Martin, the 20th-century dance critic, almost ignored the formal aspect of dance in emphasizing its role as a physical expression of inner emotion. In doing so, he betrayed his own sympathy toward the Expressionist school of modern American dance: “At the root of all these varied manifestations of dancing . . . lies the common impulse to resort to movement to externalise states which we cannot externalise by rational means. This is basic dance.”
A truly universal definition of dance must, therefore, return to the fundamental principle that dance is an art form or activity that utilizes the body and the range of movement of which the body is capable. Unlike the movements performed in everyday living, dance movements are not directly related to work, travel, or survival. Dance may, of course, be made up of movements associated with these activities, as in the work dances common to many cultures, and it may even accompany such activities. But even in the most practical dances, movements that make up the dance are not reducible to those of straightforward labour; rather, they involve some extra qualities such as self-expression, aesthetic pleasure, and entertainment.
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This article discusses the techniques and components of dance as well as the aesthetic principles behind its appreciation as an art. Various types of dance are discussed with emphasis on their style and choreography. The history of dance in various regions is treated in a number of articles; see dance, African; music and dance, Oceanic; dance, Western; arts, Central Asian; arts, East Asian; arts, Islamic; dance, Native American; arts, South Asian; and arts, Southeast Asian. The interaction between dance and other art forms is discussed in folk dance.