Origins in Antiquity

• Dance


  Involves moving the body rhythmically, often in a choreographed way and usually to music
• Dance


  • Can express aesthetic ideas and emotions as a form of performance art presented to an audience
• Earliest historical records showing the origins of dance are cave paintings in India

  8000 BCE
• Egyptian tomb paintings also depict dance

  3300 BCE
• Dionysus


  Wine god
• Bacchus


  Roman god
• Reasons early people enjoyed dance

  • Enjoyment
  • Seduction
  • Entertainment
• In India and China, dance was restricted by British colonists, who considered the dances immoral
• Chinese dance dates back at least 3,000 years, with ceremonial dances and folk dances. To this day, celebrations still include traditional dances such as the dragon dance and Lion Dance
• In Europe, the folk dances of the Middle Ages turned into formal ballroom dancing
• The waltz swept around the world as a major dance craze in the mid-nineteenth century
• Ballet


  To dance
• Some ballet dancers found the rules (pointe shoes) of classical ballet to be restrictive
• George Balanchine & Martha Graham – they began to deconstruct ballet to create new forms of performance dance