Ten-thousand-year rock art already shows people dancing
Rock art at Bhimbetka in central India, roughly ten millennia old, and Egyptian burial paintings from about 3300 BC already depict dancers. Long before writing, patterned movement was likely one way communities passed stories from one generation to the next.
Dance is sequenced body motion with aesthetic or symbolic weight, improvised or planned, usually with music and sometimes with the dancer playing an instrument. Theatrical or concert dance puts virtuoso spectacle on a stage—ballet, modern dance, Bharatanatyam, Chinese and Japanese dance dramas—often with mime, costume, and specially written scores. Participatory forms such as folk, line, square, and ballroom dancing serve bonding, ceremony, or exercise more than spectators, and rarely carry a plot; a rave crowd may even move with no coordination at all.
The evidence is old. Rock paintings at Bhimbetka in Madhya Pradesh are about 10,000 years old, and Egyptian tomb scenes of dancers date to around 3300 BC. Greek choros appears in Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Lucian; the Bible and Talmud hold over thirty dance terms; Neolithic Chinese pottery shows hand-holding line dancers, and the earliest Chinese word for dance is on oracle bones. In first-millennium-BCE India, Bharata Muni’s Natya Shastra treated drama with dance at its core.
Rhythm binds the art to music. A beat sets tempo while accents and rests set metre, and one simple step roughly matches one pulse; the tango, for instance, moves in 2/4 at about 66 beats a minute. Because bodies alternate left and right, much dance falls into duple or quadruple time, though Balkan folk traditions use far more complex patterns. Thoinot Arbeau’s sixteenth-century Orchésographie opens by defining more than eighty drum rhythms.
Which came first is disputed. Lincoln Kirstein suggested music may have grown from dance, and Ted Shawn called dance the first human art, pointing to the poetic foot as a trace of stepping bodies. Tap and gumboot dancers supply their own sound, proving the two arts can also stand apart.
Source: Dance
