Dancing Past

Humans dance. Who knows? Maybe someday it will be discovered that deep in the DNA of human intelligence, communication, brain function, dance is even older than speech, older than tool-making. For about the last ten years or so, evolutionary biologists and psychologists have returned to an idea first given scientific shape by Charles Darwin, that human language finds its origins in music. They have been gathering a growing body of evidence that suggests musical thinking preceded language and even optimized the neurological and social conditions for its emergence. (For a quick summary, see this story from NPR in 2010).

The kid on the right performs the
Neanderthal version of the
"Locomotion"

If our hominid ancestors were humming, my guess is that they were also tapping their toes. They were dancing. The two -- singing and dancing -- are pretty inseparable, despite western culture's insistence on people sitting still and facing front while listening to classical music. Most musical cultures are also cultures of movement; groove, as they say, is in the heart (and the hands and feet and arms and legs).




If you look at Greek representations of the Maenads or the Muses dancing, often as not they are also providing the musical accompaniment for their gyrations, so I think it is pretty safe to say that the song and dance,  the singer and the dancer, were at least notionally of one body.


These reflections emerge from a little experiment I did last week with a colleague who teaches a course on historical dance in the department of theater. I am teaching a medieval art class this semester, with the theme of transgression. Dancing, in the Middle Ages, was both decried as lust-provoking and dangerous, and practiced as a sacred art form, so it makes for a nice, messy problem to contemplate, a kind of model for other conflicted practices. We cooked up a week of lectures and activities around early dance that culminated with my students (mostly designers and artists) joining hers (actors) for an hour and a half of dancing together.

One of the articles I had my students read suggested that while dance was often described in histrionic terms as sexually arousing and therefore undesirable in a Christian society, at the same time it allowed for a public, formalized enactment of proper relations between the sexes in society. The carole, or circle-dance, emulated the movements of angels in heaven, a kind of harmony of bodies. More complex dances, involving figures and patterns, could of course be read as allegories.

Something else I read as I was preparing for the class really stuck with me; it gave an account of a thirteenth-century student at the University of Paris, a future cleric and theologian of some renown, who wrote rather smugly of his attainment not only as a "finder" (trouvere) of clever tunes and lyrics (in other words, a singer-song-writer), but also as a leader (e.g. choreographer and performer) of dances. It gave me a very lively image of medieval student life, in which all these young fellows would go out and dance around holding hands while their disapproving masters looked on jealously from the shadows of the cloister.

From the Queen Mary Psalter

Holding hands with someone who is neither a family member nor a mate nor indeed necessarily even a close friend is a little weird, as my students and I were reminded while we danced the carole, etc. on Thursday. But it also reminds you, in a pretty immediate and potent way, of the common fleshliness of all bodies, the shared materia of humanity. And the dancing makes it less uncomfortable -- we join our hands, we join our bodies to the music, we join the dance.

But let's not kid ourselves... dance is about the body and the body is about sex (especially in the medieval view of things). The hand holding must have made some clerics, itchy under their cassocks, very tense indeed.

On Tuesday, I closed my lecture with a clip from the film Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett and Joseph Fiennes; it may not be absolutely historically accurate, but it is wonderfully suggestive and captures the very thing that moralists of the era objected to, namely the "clipping and culling," and worse, "smouching and slabbering of one another"