Perhaps the most important influence on the way spectators perceive dance is the place in which it is performed. Religious dances usually take place within sacred buildings or on sacred ground, thus preserving their spiritual character. Most theatre dance also occurs in a special building or venue, heightening the audience’s sense that it has entered a different world. Most venues create some kind of separation between the dancers and the audience in order to intensify this illusion. A theatre with a proscenium stage, in which an arch separates the stage from the auditorium, creates a marked distance. Performance in the round, in which the dancers are surrounded by spectators on all sides, probably lessens both the distance and the illusion. In dance forms that do not traditionally take place in a theatre, such as Afro-Caribbean dance, the intimacy between audience and dancer is very close, and the former may often be called upon to participate.
The theatre space not only influences the relationship between the audience and the dancer but is also closely related to the style of the choreography. Thus, in the early court ballets, spectators sat on three sides of the dancers, often looking down at the stage, because the intricate floor patterns woven by the dancers, rather than their individual steps, were important. Once ballet was introduced into the theatre, however, dance had to develop in such a way that it could be appreciated from a single, frontal perspective. This is one reason turned-out positions were emphasized and extended, for they allowed the dancer to appear completely open to the spectators and, in particular, to move sideways gracefully without having to turn away from them in profile.
Many modern choreographers, wishing to present dance as part of ordinary life and to challenge the way in which people look at it, have used a variety of nontheatrical venues to dispel the illusion or glamour of the performance. Choreographers such as Meredith Monk, Trisha Brown, and Twyla Tharp, working in the 1960s and ’70s, performed dances in parks, streets, museums, and galleries, often without publicity or without a viewing charge. In this way dance was meant to “happen” among the people instead of in a special context. Even the most surprising or nonglamorous venue, however, cannot entirely dispel the sense of distance between dancer and audience and between dance and ordinary life. Drama
Throughout history there has been a rough division between dramatic dance, which expresses or imitates emotion, character, and narrative action, and purely formal dance, which stresses the lines and patterns of movement itself (see above Dance as dramatic expression or abstract form). The type and function of dramatic dance vary considerably, including full-length theatrical works (in which dance is used to tell a story and present specific characters), hunting dances (in which the dancers’ movements imitate those of a particular animal), and courtship dances (which may contain only a few pantomimic gestures, such as a lift, a curtsy, or a mock kiss, to convey meaning).
Moros y cristianos dance-drama from Guatemala. The dancer depicting the Moor is on the right and the Christian on the left.Photo Trends/Globe Photos
Because dance movements are often closely related to everyday forms of physical expression, there is an expressive quality inherent in nearly all dancing. This quality is used extensively in dramatic dance to communicate action or emotion—for example, the aggression in stamping movements, the exhilaration communicated by jumping, and the dragging motions of despair. Mime, or narrative gesture, is also used. Mime can either imitate movement realistically—in a death scene, for example, where the killer assumes a ferocious expression and imitates strangling a victim—or it can function as a symbol—as in the circling movement of the arms in ballet to represent dancing or in pointing to the fourth finger to represent marriage. Dance movements are often accompanied by other elements, such as masks, costume, music, acting, singing, recitation, and even film, to help communicate the dramatic content. Cultural distinction between dramatic and formal dance
Musicologist Curt Sachs argued that the division between dramatic and formal dance in tribal cultures followed the division between hunting and planter cultures. While the accuracy of his claim may be hard to establish, it can help to illuminate the different types and function of dance that lie at the root of such a division. In hunting dances (and war dances as well) the dancers’ movements are dramatically charged, expressing a state of excitement or aggression and frequently imitating the movements of animals or fighting men, even to the point of manipulating weapons. Imitative sounds increase the power of the illusion, as does the wearing of masks, makeup, or animal skins. The effect on both dancer and spectator is to be drawn into a fictional world, in which the dancers become the people or animals that they represent and the story or situation enacted by the dance takes on an immediate reality. Any successful dramatic dance should, in fact, produce this effect, even if the dancers do not actually feel the emotions they are representing or the spectators respond as if the imitation were real.
In the dances of planter cultures, Sachs argued, the movements tend to be smaller and not directly imitative. The groupings of the dancers and the floor patterns traced by their steps, on the other hand, tend to be much more complex and ordered. In addition, the sequence of movements tends to be more repetitive and the dancers’ movements are more uniform. Such formal dances are often performed as part of a ritual propitiation of the gods in order to assure good weather and successful harvests. Although their movements may not be imitative, the repetitive patterns often represent such natural occurrences as the cycle of the seasons, the waxing and waning of the Moon, and the growing of vegetation, and they even evoke more abstract entities such as space and time. The effect may thus be one of fusing the dancers and spectators with some aspect of the natural world. At the same time the dance may produce an effect similar to the repetitive chanting of prayer or meditation, emptying the mind of its usual preoccupations and focusing it on the object of worship. In fact, the power of dance in achieving this type of spiritual discipline is peculiarly strong, since the repetitive movements work kinesthetically as well as aurally and visually. As a consequence, mind and body are equally absorbed into the ritual.
Lotuxo rainmakers of South Sudan dancing. Hereditary rainmakers are the ritual and political leaders of Lotuxo villages.George Roger/Magnum
Even where formal dances are not part of a ritual (as in modern plotless dance works), the movement of the dancers may produce an effect not dissimilar to that described above. Space, time, and the force of gravity may be made apparent to the spectator through the trajectories that the dancers make in space, through the configurations that they form on the dance floor, through the duration of the dance phrases, and through the alternating sensations of weight and weightlessness created by falls and jumps. In a similar way, too, the audience may experience a special focusing of attention, a draining of the usual habits of perception through the kinesthetic, visual, and aural power of the movement and music.
Many extant tribal dances can be categorized as either imitative or formal, as can the European folk dances that developed out of earlier tribal dance forms. Courtship dances, the descendants of ancient courtship and fertility dances, still retain overt imitations of flirtatiousness. Other dances have similarly retained their early formal character, even, in some cases, retaining the symbolic significance of their patterns. In Ukrainian dances descended from pagan Moon-worshiping ritual, the circling of the dancers represents the way the Moon influences the work in the fields, and the final pivot represents the flourishing of the corn. In Armenian carpet-weaving dances, the complex floor patterns mimic the action of the work process. Drama in Western theatre dance