History about Dance!

Dance is a hobby that I started learning way back in 2008, and now learn sporadically. It is a great stress buster and a good form of exercise, if you do it regularly!

In this blog I shall be taking you through the early years of dance

History of Dance is difficult to access as dance does not leave behind any identifiable physical artifacts. One cannot say with exact precision when dance became part of human culture.

Dance has been an important part of ceremony, rituals, celebrations and entertainment since the birth of the earliest human civilizations.

Archaeology delivers traces of dance from prehistoric times such as the 30,000-year-old Bhimbetka rock shelters paintings in India and Egyptian tomb paintings where dancing figures from c. 3300 BC are depicted.

Dance may have been used as a tool of social interaction that promoted cooperation essential for survival among early humans.

Many dances of the early periods were performed to celebrate festivals, on important or seasonal occasions such as crop harvest, or births and weddings. Such dances are found all over the world.

Dance may be performed in religious or shamanic rituals, for example the rain dance performed in times of drought. Shamans dancing for rain is mentioned in ancient Chinese texts.

Dance is an important aspect of some religious rites in ancient Egypt.

Similarly, dance is also integral to many ceremonies and rites among African people.

Another early use of dance may have been as a precursor to ecstatic trance states in healing rituals. Dance is used for this purpose by many cultures from the Brazilian rainforest to the Kalahari Desert.

Medieval European danses macabres were thought to have protected participants from disease; however; the hysteria and duration of these dances sometimes led to death due to exhaustion.

According to a Sinhalese legend, Kandyan dances originated 2500 years ago, from a magic ritual that broke the spell on a bewitched king. Many contemporary dance forms can be traced back to historical, traditional, ceremonial and ethnic dances.

One of the earliest structured uses of dances may have been in the performance and in the telling of myths. It was also sometimes used to show feelings for one of the opposite gender. It is also linked to the origin of love making.

Before the production of written languages, dance was one of the methods of passing these stories down from generation to generation.

The early Greeks made the art of dancing into a system, expressive of all the different passions. For example, the dance of the Furies, so represented, would create complete terror among those who witnessed them.

The Greek philosopher, Aristotle ranked dancing with poetry, and said that certain dancers, with rhythm applied to gesture, could express manners, passions, and actions. The most eminent Greek sculptors studied the attitude of the dancers for their art of imitating the passion.

An early Indian manuscript describing dance is the Natya Shastra on which is based the modern interpretation of the classical Indian dances such as Bharathanatyam, and Kathak.

The ancient Sinhalese chronicle Mahavamsa states that when King Vijaya landed in Sri Lanka in 543 BCE he heard sounds of music and dancing from a wedding ceremony. The classical dances of Sri Lanka (Kandyan) dances feature a highly developed system of tala (rhythm), provided by cymbals called thalampataa.

During the reign of the last Mughals and Nawabs of Awadh, dance fell down to the status of nautch, which was an an unethical sensuous thing of courtesans. This later linked dance with immoral trafficking and prostitution. The British rule prohibited public performance of dance. Many disapproved it.

In 1947, India won her freedom and for dance it was an ambience where it could regain its past glory. Classical forms and regional distinctions were re-discovered, ethnic specialties were honored and by synthesizing them with the individual talents of the masters in the line and fresh innovations emerged dance with a new face but with classicism of the past.

There is a long recorded history of Chinese dances. Some of the dances mentioned in ancient texts, such as dancing with sleeve movements are still performed today. Some of the early dances were associated with shamanic rituals mentioned earlier in this blog. Folk dances of the early period were also developed into court dances. The important dances of the ancient period were the ceremonial yayue dated to the Zhou dynasty of the first millennium BC. The art of dance in China reached its peak during the Tang dynasty, a period when dances from many parts of the world also performed at the imperial court. However, Chinese opera became popular during the Song and Yuan dynasty, and many dances were merged into Chinese opera. The best-known of the Chinese traditional dances are the dragon dance and lion dance. The Lion dance was described in the Tang dynasty in form that resembles today's dance.

18th and 19th centuries: from court dancing to Romanticism

By the 18th century, ballet had migrated from the French and Italian royal courts to the Paris Opera under the careful direction of composer/dancer Jean-Baptiste Lully. During this century, ballet developed throughout Europe, from a courtly arrangement of moving images used as part of a larger spectacle, to a performance art in its own right: the ballet d' action. The ballet d' action strove to express, for the first time, human emotions drawn directly from the dancers themselves. At the end of the century, dancers wore soft slippers fitting snuggly along the foot. This shoe design instilled confidence within the ballerina, daring her to dance on her toes. This opened the door to pointework in which a ballet dancer supports all body weight on the tips of fully extended feet within pointe shoes, and a more naturalistic costuming allowed the development of the heel-less shoe, which led to the dancer being able to make more use of the rise onto demi-pointe.

Early 20th century: from ballet to contemporary dance

Since the Ballets Russes began revolutionizing ballet in the early 20th century, there have been continued attempts to break the mold of classical ballet. Currently the artistic scope of ballet technique (and its accompanying music, jumper, and multimedia) is more all-encompassing than ever. The boundaries that classify a work of classical ballet are constantly being stretched, muddied and blurred until perhaps all that remains today are traces of technique idioms such as turnout. .It was during the explosion of new thinking and exploration in the early 20th century that dance artists began to appreciate the qualities of the individual, the necessities of ritual and religion, the primitive, the expressive and the emotional.

In this atmosphere, modern dance began an explosion of growth. There was suddenly a new freedom in what was considered acceptable, what was considered art, and what people wanted to create. All kinds of other things were suddenly valued as much as, or beyond, the costumes and tricks of the ballet.

Most of the early 20th century modern choreographers and dancers saw ballet in the most negative light. Isadora Duncan thought it most ugly, nothing more than meaningless gymnastics. Martha Graham saw it as European and Imperialistic, having nothing to do with the modern American people. Merce Cunningham, while using some of the foundations of the ballet technique in his teaching, approached choreography and performance from a totally radical standpoint compared to the traditional balletic format.

The 20th century was indeed a period of breaking away from everything that ballet stood for. It was a time of unprecedented creative growth, for dancers and choreographers. It was also a time of shock, surprise and broadening of minds for the public, in terms of their definitions of what dance was. It was a revolution in the truest sense.

The late 20th and early 21st centuries

After the explosion of modern dance in the early 20th century, the 1960s saw the growth of postmodernism. Post modernism veered towards simplicity, the beauty of small things, the beauty of untrained body, and unsophisticated movement. Unfortunately lack of costumes, stories and outer trappings do not make a good dance show, and it was not long before sets, décor and shock value re-entered the vocabulary of modern choreographers.

By the 1980s, dance had come full circle and modern dance (or, by this time, contemporary dance) was clearly still a highly technical and political vehicle for many practitioners. Existing alongside classical ballet, the two art-forms were by now living peacefully next door to one another with little of the rivalry and antipathy of previous eras.

At the same time, mass culture experienced expansion of street dance. In 1974, famous group Jackson 5 performed on television a dance called Robot (choreographed by Michael Jackson. This event and later Soul Train performances by black dancers ignited street culture revolution, which later formed break dancing rocks dance.

Hip hop dance started when Clive Campbell, aka Kool DJ Herc and the father of hip-hop, came to New York from Jamaica in 1967. Toting the seeds of reggae from his homeland, he is credited with being the first DJ to use two turntables and identical copies of the same record to create his jams.

But it was his extension of the breaks in these songs—the musical section where the percussive beats were most aggressive—that allowed him to create and name a culture of break boys and break girls who laid it down when the breaks came up. Briefly termed b-boys and b-girls, these dancers founded breakdancing, which is now a cornerstone of hip-hop dance