Ritual Dance: Tower Dancers -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 12:48:41 02/15/08 Fri
Author: CS Holden
Subject: Ritual Dance: Tower Dancers

I'm in the dance concert, and at the final dress rehearsal last night I started thinking about dance and how it has always been connected to ritual, i.e., religious dances, the sun dance, the new wave of Christian aisle dancers found in some churches. And I also started thinking about the Jack Handy SNL quote, "Boxing is just like ballet, except there's no music and the dancers hit each other." Dance = violence, in a way.

So I encourage you guys to go to the dance concert this weekend (shamelessly, I might add), and think about the element of violence found in modern dance. Also consider the evolution of modern dance, and how it broke from the rigid constructs of ballet and yet still retains much of ballet's influence. In every modern dance there is an element of danger and darkness surging just underneath the grace and beauty, and in the best dances a kind of ritualistic violence arises, answering some basic questions, like "What caused this to happen?" The basic format of a lot of modern dance pieces is this:

A) There is tranquility.
B) Something disrupts the tranquility; chaos ensues in a ritualized fashion.
C) It is revealed that the disruption was actually part of the tranquility the whole time, and the resulting synthesis of calm and angst should be as beautiful as it is unsettling.

No wonder, then, that many violent religious acts are performed with the strict choreographic sense of, or sometimes even in the course of, a dance ritual.

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