Dancing as An Affirmation of Life

Friedrich Nietzsche once said,

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

Dancing is one of the most universal forms of self expression and artistry – native to cultures old and new across the globe and across the ages.

Some cultures hold dance as a highly elite and sacred art form. For example, Premodern Indian cultures have used dance as a religious spiritual observance, in which the body performs a series of motions representative of the abstract divinity of the elements which make up the universe.

Modern Indian dancing is a fusion of classical, folk, and modern dance steps, which are often combined on-screen for Bollywood film song-and-dance sequences.

In a similar vein, yet completely different style, the Whirling Dervishes of Istanbul practice devotional Sufi tradition of the Mevlevi order, and a source of inspiration for many famous poets, musicians, and other devotional artsts.

Ballet is a dance which has maintained a reputation in contemporary society, but in fact dates back all the way to the Italian Renaissance, and has managed to maintain popularity over centuries by adapting to and absorbing elements of more contemporary dance forms.

Ballet is still part of popular culture today, the subject of Oscar-nominated film Black Swan

Despite the increasingly insular nature of contemporary, technologically wired society, one of the recent musical phenomenons, EDM, is music designated for dancing to. Rave culture is a big deal for teens and young adults. (doandroidsdance.com)

What is it about dance that is so universal to human culture? Beyond the obvious benefits of physical activity, psychological studies posit correlations between dance-like movements and elevation of mood. Moreover, dancing is a way of training coordination, memory, and self-expression.

I believe the explanation is simple: dancing is universal because it is the most accessible art form – requiring only a will to move rhythmically with affect. More than any film, article, or documentary about dance that I have seen, a moment from the movie Wall-E drives this point home most for me.

In the linked scene, a human captain of a spaceship who has never visited Earth asks his computer’s database to explain dancing to him. The computer replies:

A series of movements involving two partners, where speed and rhythm match harmoniously with music.

The definition voices over robots Wall-E and EVE playfully flying through the starry void of space with a synergy that feels more human than mechanical. Within the context of the film, this is a strategy to help promote audience identification with an inorganic protagonist and robot love story – but read more broadly, is a statement on how essentially human the act of dancing is.