Dance is not just for dancers

Writing on dance has meant traversing a fairly wide range of interests of diverse readers - dancers to rasikas, armchair explorers to academic and cultural life-long learners, aficionados and dance students young and old along with their parents or significant others. Some revere “The Dance” and dance artists while others presume dancers are little more than not-too-bright exhibitionists.

Since dance has been around as long as humans have moved on two feet, much has been said about it in recorded history. We all know that modern physicists compare the implosion and explosion of the universe to the dance of Shiva as the closest metaphor for they currently understand matter functions in the universe but I would like to share earlier Western thoughts on dance from philosophers, writers and, yes, a few dancers, not just for dancers.

Who better to start with than Socrates? “There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time, when he was an old man, to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent”, according to Montaigne, the French Renaissance philosopher and statesman.

Plato, the 4th century BCE Greek philosopher pronounced that “To sing well and to dance is to be well educated. And also “In order to be a good soldier it is necessary to know how to dance.”

Always wickedly witty, the 17th century French playwright Moliere conjectured that perhaps learning dancing was all our political leaders needed to avoid our tragic misfortunes. “When someone blunders, we say that he makes a misstep. Is it then not clear that all the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill our history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill in dancing?” Earlier Shakespeare said, “Tell him there is measure in everything and so dance out the answer”.

More seriously, the German writer Jean Paul Richter (1763-1825) clearly saw that “The gymnasium of running, walking on stilts, climbing, etc. stells  (Stell: to place firmly in position) and makes hardy single powers and muscles, but dancing, like a corporeal poesy, embellishes, exercises, and equalizes all the muscles at once.”

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) had quite a bit to say about dance. “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once... I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art; finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his “divine service”…Dancing in all its forms cannot be excluded from the curriculum of all noble education: dancing with the feet, with ideas, with words, and, need I add that one must also be able to dance with the pen?”

I wonder if Nietzsche was aware of how many Hindu gods dance when he stated “I should not believe in a God who does not dance. I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.”

Throughout the ages many have commented on the barrenness of a life without dance. “So you can’t dance? Not at all? Not even one step? . . . How can you say that you’ve taken any trouble to live when you won’t even dance?” Hermann Hesse (1877-1962), German poet. “There are short-cuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.” Vicki Baum (1888-1960), Austrian writer, produced on Broadway and Hollywood. Author D.H. Lawrence, same era stated, “We ought to dance with rapture that we might be alive...and part of the living, incarnate cosmos”.

I had the pleasure of a few classes with Mary Anthony (1928-2014) whose work as a dancer and choreographer were highly influenced by Martha Graham and Hanya Holm. I can hear her voice in this truism, “Dance is a life, everyday. Don’t miss it. You’re in bodies, you can move, you’re not in wheelchairs. Where is your joy?”

A motivation not just for us, but for our children as well in the words of English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704),  “Nothing appears to me to give children so much confidence, and so to raise them to the conversation of those above their age, as dancing.”

Even the great American singer-musician James Brown (1933-2006) believed,” Any problem in the world can be solved by dancing”.

One of my favorite novelists, Margaret Atwood said, “I would rather dance as a ballerina, though faultily, than as a flawless clown.”And who can dispute the wisdom of Snoopy, the dog in Charles Schulzt’s Peanuts cartoon, “To live is to dance, to dance is to live”.

With our bodies as the instrument of creative expression, dance embodies our cultural identities. Confucius said, in the 5th century BCE, “A nation’s character is typified by its dancers”.

This sentiment is echoed in the words of the great modern dance stage and film choreographer Agnes de Mille, “The truest expression of a people is in its dance and in its music. Bodies never lie”.

At the turn of the 19th century, British physician Havelock Ellis believed, “Dancing as an art, we may be sure, cannot die out, but will always be undergoing a rebirth. Not merely as an art, but also as a social custom, it perpetually emerges afresh from the soul of the people… Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is not mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.”

I have always admired Emma Goldman (1869–1940), a major figure in the history of American radicalism and feminism, so it really makes me smile that she said, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution”.

Nothing could round out this nudge to get you out of your chair to dance around the room then one of my favorite Lewis Carroll quotes from Alice in Wonderland, “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?”

Sharon Lowen is a respected exponent of Odissi, Manipuri and Mayurbhanj and Seraikella Chau whose four-decade career in India was preceded by 17 years of modern dance and ballet in the US and an MA in dance from the University of Michigan. She can be  contacted at sharonlowen.workshop@gmail.com