Dance as Community Experience - Essay Example

In the novel Zorba the Greek, Zorba tries to explain certain feelings to the metaphysical philosopher, the narrator, but all his efforts turn flat on him. He starts dancing and the narrator becomes ecstatic and all is crystal clear to him. Zorba dances the “Dance of Life” which is communicative and expressive. In this essay I would focus on the expressive element of dance and how does dance assimilates the individual in the community and help to create a pluralistic society in general.

Frank Trippett in his article says, “In fact, Homo sapiens, as a communicator, does not seem to have come all that from the time when grunts and gesticulations were the main ways of getting the message across.”¹ He opines that in our day-to-day life we mostly lean heavily on indirect gestures and charades. H'Doubler in the introduction of his classic book Dance says that the basis of unrest is the necessity to live and the unrest is the activity that has a purpose, “working toward the restoration of harmony with environment or self as the case may be.” ² The history of dance reveals that in the prehistoric era it was an unintentional movement to please gods and the performer had no idea that he was creating art. The movements were rhythmical sometimes whirling to go beyond the ego and to become one with the whole. Dance was the media to express pent-up feelings, emotions, and beliefs.³ 

The changes the people experienced throughout the life span had also been the subject matter in primitive cultures. Changes of seasons and the changes that came about on the winning or losing wars were all expressed in dances. With the development of cultures, two kinds of dance emerged: social dances and magical and religious dances. “The medicine men of primitive cultures, whose power to invoke the assistance of a god were feared and respected, are considered by many to be the first choreographers or composers of formal dances.”4.

The history of social dances can be traced back to the courts of Europe and primitive cultures. Gradually ballroom dancing, once the activity of aristocracy, became popular among the masses

Christine Loma is of the view that the existing theatrical aesthetic ignores the social context of dance; the existing aesthetic gives importance to form and content. She refutes the common theory of aesthetics and instead brings out the more ‘appropriate aesthetic’, as she suggests, which emphasizes context and intent instead of form and content. To her the role of community dance, be it ceremonial or ritual, is to reconcile past, present, and future. In giving more importance to celebrations “we emphasize the relationship of self and community. We all are bearers of our community experience as individual participants in collective resonance”5.  

Browsing through the history of dance it dawns that it has been the effective “slogan” of change in society and it helped to realize the dream of the pluralistic society. Ellen Graff narrates how did dance prove to be a weapon for the people to face the bitter span of the history of America. The socially conscious dancers and the political worker, sympathetic to communism, sparked a revolution in the history of dancing it was an ‘antielitist’ modern dance which was within the framework of proletarian culture, and “Dance is a Weapon in the Revolutionary Class Struggle” became the slogan of the Worker Dance League which was formed on the May Day celebration held at the Bronx Coliseum in 1932. The debates continued whether to adopt the techniques of folklore only or to mingle it with the bourgeois techniques. After hot parleys, it was decided to adopt the bourgeois techniques to make their message more acceptable to the people.  That art movement was really a democratic movement because the participants had the ideal of pluralistic culture to prevail in the society. 6.

The colonial period distorted the cultural heritage of the conquered colonies and looked down upon the cultural heritage of the native people. The attitude which is Monetarist materialism to Christine Loma ingrained the concept of “them” and “us”. Karisma Welsh Asante tries to demystify the colonial myth that women weave in African dance as ‘artistic and functional’. She says that it is not an accident of history that the African women dance bear-breasted. The ‘noble savage’ defends this tradition on aesthetic and religious grounds. The fact is that colonial legacy instilled in African men as hypersexual and African women was scorned and was a source of fascination for the European societies; the tradition of a dance of bare-breasted was introduced by the whites to disgrace the African Woman. Whereas, on scanning the texts of African societies Kariamu Welsh Asante found that Woman in African dances is expressed as a “symbol of natural and supernatural” and the body of the woman represents the incorporated and unified part of cosmic unity.7

Christine Loma beautifully narrates the importance of dance to bring about a pluralistic society, she believes in the fact that dance can redress the negative experience of an individual by ‘responding proactively to disempowerment and disenfranchisement’ by using dance as an arbitrator in relation to nature and culture.