The Mysterious Thing Called Dance

I wrote the other day about the sin of dancing and how it dominated the 1920's. Cities had ordinances against specific dancing, mostly named after women's movement like the shimmy. I mentioned it was a major form of sin in the church of my youth.

We've all seen videos of tribal dancing, frenzied dancing around fires. Surely this is some kind of spiritual experience. Wiccans/pagans dances around Maypoles and such might be the same. Maybe the reason 1920's Christians were so against dancing was because earlier Pietism in Christianity had watched its effect on people and feared it.

I mentioned in a earlier post we just had a granddaughter perform ballet in our building's parking lot. She is the second in that family to study ballet from small childhood on. To me ballet is full of illusions. When the male dancer brings the ballerina down from his shoulder he pauses just before her toe shoe touches the floor. It creates the illusion she is almost weightless. All of the moves are made to look natural but are very unnatural and result in constant injuries.

When I was a Mayor we gave grants to various non profits in the arts for several years. Then a budget problem meant we could no long do so. The performing arts groups, opera, symphony, etc. said they were disappointed but understood. The dance company head, however, came before us completely dumbfounded. "You can't possible do this," she said. "We are dance." That her group was just one of the performing arts groups had never occurred to her. The dance company was, to her, such an important part of the community's life it had to be funded like the police and fire departments.

Since then I've come to see that view of dance as common within the dance community. It is seen as the way cultures, ethnic groups, spiritual identities and even countries self identify. Perhaps it represents something like the phrase, "We are a Christian nation."

Watching dance of 20 years has been a joy. Paying for new toe shoes has not.