Understanding Dance Cultures

¶ … Gerald Jonas' text Dancing -- the Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement attempts the difficult feat of conveying "The power of dance," a kinesthetic practice, into prose. Perhaps this is why the book was originally issued as a companion to a PBS video series of the same title, so the concepts Jonas talks about could be illustrated in lived, visualized, moving form on television. The first chapter of Dancing -- the Pleasure, Power, and Art of Movement stresses that dance a multifaceted practice.

Dance is, paradoxically a classical art form, a cultural expression, a creative individualistic way of expressing emotion with the body and also a cultural, larger 'heart beat' of national life and religious and social ritual practices. The intellectual maneuverings involved in understanding the bodily movement involved in dancing thus involve four, somewhat contradictory elements. First of all dance is a natural practice, beyond culture. The chapter of the book begins with how kinesthetic movement is one of the first impulses a baby feels upon leaving the womb.

To move is to be alive. Also, the desire to move in time to music is a cross-cultural and transnational phenomenon, more so than even written and recorded literacy. How one moves, of course, varies from culture to culture -- from the different dances done at weddings, to simply the different way an African vs. An American person may walk around the marketplace of a home village. Secondly, while dance is universal, it is also intensely individualistic. Because no one has the same body no one dances the same.

Even in the most homogeneous of cultures, interpretations of music and musical likes and dislikes will vary. Also, "meaning as well as beauty is in the eye of the beholder." (Jonas 12) Even within a culture, the meaning of a dance may be different to one person than another. A modern dancer may see ballet as stifling, while a classical ballerina may see it as her mode of expressing herself, through art.

A father may see the first dance of a wedding he enjoys with his daughter as a painfully exercised ritual of giving the young woman away, while the daughter may see the dance as a touching tribute to all that her parents have given to her over the years. Despite these differences of movement and musical and personal interpretations of meaning, dance is also a standardized art form.

Every ballerina studying the art of ballet has learned the same first position, from 19th century Russian girls to 21st century American children. Also, dance can enact specific cultural courtship rituals that are highly constructed in their nature. Even when not danced by professionals, the minuets and social dances of the 18th century, and the adolescent dances popular in America during the 1950's has to be learned through schooling and observation, even when one put one's individual spin upon those dances.

But even when expressed in an art form, what constitutes good or appropriate dancing also varies from culture to culture. Dancing can function in the context of communal as well as individual expressions, and become a form of enacting religious worship, social order, as well as fulfill the steps of classical and social arts of.