Why Humans Dance
Aug 4th, 2010 | By Adam
When I was in 8th grade I was a hard core Doors fan and you don’t really dance to the Doors. As a result a friend once derided me for thinking I was “too cool to dance”. That got me thinking…
Have you ever wondered just what exactly the point of that gyrating around that we do is all about? It’s certainly possible to enjoy music without moving at all. How does it help to add kinetics to it?
There are two famous Biblical stories about dancing. The first is when Miriam the Prophetess leads the Jewish women in a (drum) circle dance just after the nation was saved from the Egyptian army. The second was when King David ecstatically danced before the Ark of the Covenant as it was being brought into Jerusalem. This raised the ire of his wife Michal who was shocked at the raw emotionality he displayed in public, commenting that he had conducted himself “as one of the empty people”.
These two stories serve as paradigms to explain the two purposes of dancing (from a spiritual perspective). The Miriam story is very deep, but suffice it to say that there is a certain point at which one’s consciousness expands to such a degree that it can no longer be contained by the heart and mind alone and the entire organism needs to be utilized to capture the moment. As Sarah Schneider explains it, it’s “like trying to run a complex graphic program on an antiquated laptop, there is not enough space in the computer’s brain to hold the complexity of operations…similarly here, ‘circle awareness’ is so vast that it takes an entire body to hold it”.
It was similar with David, though in his case the dance was the vehicle for him to access those deeper recesses of his consciousness. Like other repetitive acts such as mantras, prayer and meditation, the dancing “bores” the analytical mind into shutting off, opening a purer and deeper channel. In this regard, dancing and praying could be considered very closely related (when done properly)
Dancing can reveal all the mystery that music conceals. ~Charles Baudelaire
Dance is the hidden language of the soul. ~Martha Graham
What intense dance experiences have you had? Tell me about it in the comments below…
Two events come to mind, actually more, but let two suffice for now. Once, I was about nineteen, think it was `79, I was living with almost total abandon, in my car off Alligator Alley, in Ft. Lauderdale, working, buying gasoline and beer. I went down to the strip by the beach on a Sunday afternoon, went to a bar called The Button, it was the afternoon as I said so the place was hardly packed, on came Michael Jackson’s Don’t Stop `till You Get Enough, I danced wildly on the dance floor by myself, after two or three or four cold beers on a hot sunny day, who wouldn’t? It was a dance I’ll never forget `cause nothing seemed to matter except that song, it’s beat, the fact that it was telling me to don’t stop till I got enough and my willingness to try and not stop till I got enough. I didn’t…
Another time was when I was volunteering at a kibbutz, Ma’agan Michael – musta’ been `90 or `91, there was a party room and after Shabbat the young people would head over there to party, I danced to Saturday Night Fever, with equal abandon, and again alone, and charmed all, or most, or some of the chicks, I was totally free, the Bee Gees set me free, while I was no Tony Mannero, I was still Rob Kabakoff, the New Yorker, the “Last Zionist” they called me, and some how, `till I made my last move, had every one’s attention.
I was twenty in `79.
Rob,
I loved reading that.
HH
Thanks HH. I was 21 in `79.