The History of Dance

Dance is as old as the most primitive human societies: in the regions inhabited by primitives, the only building that, by its importance, differs from the other humble huts of the village is the one where individuals gather to dance.

Scientists who have discovered prehistoric caves in France have found in the clay the footprints of dancers thousands of years ago. This distant Antiquity and this spontaneous character of the dance, its persistence which shows it is associated with the origin and development of human society, makes us think that dance responds to a deep human interest and undoubtedly exercises a useful function of life.

In primitive peoples, dancing was a magical ritual. Among the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, along with religious and sacred rituals, which were subject to strict regulation, reserved for the servants of gods and virgins whose intact beauty could please the immortals, there were profane dances that were among the much-loved games.

The game has a biological role

It exists only in the higher species and is a preparatory exercise of instincts, a mixture of useful reactions in the struggle for the conquest of means of subsistence. The games are different according to the living species, according to their instincts, and according to the conditions in which each group of beings adapts to the environment.

There are, in animals and humans, fighting games, hunting games, erotic games. The kitten is thrown on the spool of thread or the piece of paper, just as it will be thrown, later, after it has been lying on it, with all the muscles stretched, on the bird or the mouse. The little girl is playing with the doll, but the weeks or years of her childhood are not a waste of time.

The species that end up gaining a behavior capable of the most varied adaptation are those in which individuals have had the longest childhood. The dance game can be a wonderful gymnastics that has, compared to the stereotypical movements of several methods of physical culture, the advantage of attraction.

The rhythms of the dance express situations, moods. They are opportunities for graceful figures. The advantages of harmonious physical exercise are gained without the will to take part in fulfilling an insipid need. Charity is reaped in the smile of fun. In Greece, dancing was part of education.

Plato wrote: "There are dances that consider the body; they serve to develop its power, suppleness, beauty; they teach each member how to bend and stretch, to learn through light and harmonious movements, with all the figures, with all the attitudes we can ask of him ".

Harmonious development

Dance can also be the way we express our affection. The bodily expressions of feelings have a great power of suggestion over the soul. Through the movements they performed, the Greek dancers introduced in their soul and heart feelings favorable to certain acts.

Aristotle said about dance that he excites through rhythmic movements, habits, passions, actions. The young Greeks are communicated their warrior passion by having them perform a warrior dance, the Pyrrhic dance. At banquets, at the ancient Greeks, the host entertains his guests with dances. Some dances formed real silent scenes; one of them, much appreciated, was the hymn of Dionysus and Ariane.

The harmonious development of the muscles, the prevention of the thickening of the joints, is not the only object of the choreographic exercises. The dance is used to translate thoughts through symbols that people used before using the voice, the first excessive sign being gestures. The dances are true poems, in which the soul is revealed not in rhythmic words, but with the help of rhythmic gestures, suitable for the natural reactions of emotion.

Dancing is therefore a pastime: it gives the performer the feelings born spontaneously through the voluntary or artificial expression of passions; he offers the spectator, thanks to his muscular plasticity, the rhythmic emotional expressions of a silent drama. For a long time, in France, the dances that were performed for fun and those that formed theatrical entertainment were not different.

These dances were modest and did not include the American-inspired hugs to the dance.

The game of imagination

In the 18th century, theater dances, due to their growing complication, began to be reserved only for those who had been specially trained for a long time. Today, a good dancer, to have a chance of success, must start learning to move from a very young age, and a dancing star is not formed unless she has a vocation, and puts in hard work, every day.

In the absence of these exercises, the joints and ligaments have no muscles and the muscles quickly lose their ease of play. Psychoanalysis has highlighted a function of art, which is fulfilled by dance. The total sexual inclinations, not being able, under the effect of the restrictive constraints of the society, to be realized in the fullness of its expansions, are hidden in the subconscious.

But, in their compulsion, the hidden lusts boil; they can jeopardize mental balance if, from time to time, the forbidden impulses could not be exercised, to obtain satisfaction in the most ordinary form of the dream. When the subconscious impulses are too strong, their eruption in consciousness is brutal. Psychoanalysis thus explains neuroses, delusions. But art allows repressed sexual inclinations to free themselves in a game of imagination.

Aristotle noticed that the theater satisfies some curiosities, realizes the "purging of the passions". The dance would have the same function; the voluptuous embraces of tango and South American dances would exhaust the sensuality that would suddenly overwhelm the consciousness. Young women find in dance the opportunity to create gestures and forms of beauty, to express their feelings, the strongest of which is love. In the old peasant dances, their language is naive and charming.

To be a healthy game, dancing should avoid the causes of excessive sexual arousal, which irritates cravings instead of calming them down.