Dance in prehistory and antiquity
Cave paintings, about 10,000 years old, already show people dancing in groups. Early dance was a way to pray, celebrate, heal and tell stories.
- Circle and line dances: everyone joins, there is no audience.
- Egypt: dancers in temple and funeral ceremonies.
- Greece: the chorus danced and sang in theatre; the word 'choreography' comes from Greek 'choreia' (dance) and 'graphein' (to write).
- India: the Natya Shastra (about 200 BCE–200 CE) explains dance, drama, music, gestures (mudras) and feelings (rasa). It is the root of Indian classical dance.
Middle Ages and Renaissance
In Europe, ordinary people danced carols (round dances) at festivals. At royal courts, dance became a sign of good education.
- Dances such as the basse danse and pavane were slow and gliding; the galliard had small jumps.
- Dancing masters wrote the first dance books with steps and rules.
- Court shows mixed dance, music, poetry and costume. In France this became the ballet de cour.
In India at the same time, dance lived in temples and royal courts, and folk dances kept village traditions alive.
Baroque and Classicism
- Louis XIV, who danced himself, founded the Royal Academy of Dance in 1661. Ballet became a profession.
- Pierre Beauchamp set the five positions of the feet, still used today. The legs turn out from the hip so the dancer can move easily sideways and look open to the audience.
- Ballet moved from the ballroom to the proscenium stage (a stage with a frame, seen from the front).
- Social dance: the elegant minuet.
- In the 1700s, Jean-Georges Noverre asked for the ballet d'action: dance should tell a story with feeling, not just show steps.
Romantic and classical ballet
- Romantic ballet (about 1830–1850): stories of spirits, fairies and lost love. Dancers rose on pointe to look weightless. White, bell-shaped long tutus. Famous works: La Sylphide (1832), Giselle (1841). Ballerinas such as Marie Taglioni became stars.
- Classical ballet (late 1800s, mostly in Russia): choreographer Marius Petipa and composer Tchaikovsky made The Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake and The Nutcracker. Short stiff tutus showed the legs; big group scenes and hard solos.
- At the same time, national and folk dances (for example the polonaise and mazurka from Poland, Hungarian csárdás) were brought into ballets and ballrooms.
20th-century ballet, modern and contemporary dance
- Ballets Russes (1909–1929, Sergei Diaghilev): short new ballets with modern music and art; dancers Nijinsky and Pavlova; Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913) shocked the audience.
- Neoclassical ballet: George Balanchine in New York – plain costumes, fast steps, the music is the story.
- Modern dance: Isadora Duncan danced barefoot in loose dress; Martha Graham used contraction and release of the breath; Doris Humphrey used fall and recovery; Rudolf Laban made a way to analyse and write movement.
- Postmodern and contemporary: Merce Cunningham let chance decide the order of moves; Pina Bausch mixed dance and theatre (Tanztheater); Alvin Ailey brought African-American stories to the stage.
- Street dance: hip-hop, breaking, popping and locking from the 1970s; breaking was in the 2024 Olympics.
- India: Rukmini Devi Arundale revived Bharatanatyam on stage; Uday Shankar mixed Indian and Western dance; today companies tour the world and festivals such as the Khajuraho Dance Festival celebrate classical forms.
Dance, society and ethnochoreology
Ethnochoreology is the study of dance – especially folk and traditional dance – inside its culture: who dances, when, why and what it means.
- Dance shows who a group is: national dances (Polish mazurka, Irish step dance, Punjabi bhangra) carry identity.
- Dance follows society: court rules in the Renaissance, freedom for women's bodies in modern dance, city life in hip-hop.
- Every country has its own choreographers, teachers and theorists; to study one, ask: what did they change, and what was happening in their society?
- Studying a dance work: look at the movement, the dancers, the space (stage, set, light), the sound, and the context (time, place, purpose).
Key formulas and definitions
- Choreography: the art of making and arranging dances (Greek choreia + graphein)
- Turn-out: rotating the legs outwards from the hip (ballet base)
- Pointe: dancing on the tips of the toes in special shoes (Romantic ballet onward)
- Contraction and release: Martha Graham's breath-based technique
- Ethnochoreology: the study of dance within its culture
Worked examples
1. A dance has dancers in a closed circle, simple repeated steps, a drum and no audience. Which era or type does it most likely belong to?
A community or folk/ritual dance, as in ancient times: everyone joins, the circle has no front, and the beat is shared.
2. A ballerina in a long white bell-shaped tutu dances on pointe as a ghost. Romantic or classical ballet?
Romantic ballet (about 1830–1850): long white tutus and supernatural stories, as in Giselle.
3. How many years passed between the Royal Academy of Dance (1661) and The Rite of Spring (1913)?
1913 − 1661 = 252 years. In that time ballet went from the French court to the modern shock of the Ballets Russes.
Common mistakes
- Thinking ballet started in Russia. It began in Italian and French courts; Russia made classical ballet famous in the late 1800s.
- Mixing up Romantic tutus (long, bell-shaped) and classical tutus (short, stiff).
- Saying modern dance and contemporary dance are the same. Modern dance began about 1900; contemporary dance (from about 1950s on) mixes many techniques.
- Treating folk dance as 'simple'. Folk dances carry deep meaning and need the cultural context to be understood.