Dance - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

Dance and culture

The dance can be an art, a ritual or an entertainment. It expresses ideas and emotions or tells a history. The dance in general has a direct report/ratio in the history with other arts (music, painting, sculpture, etc)

Dance and the body

The body can carry out all kinds of actions like turning, curving themselves, to stretch themselves, or jump. By combining them according to the dynamic ones varied, one can invent an infinity of different movements. The body passes to the state of object, it is useful has to express the emotions of the dancer through his movements, art becomes the Master of the body.

History of the dance

See also: History of the dance, historical Dance

Origins

The first indications on the execution of dances date from Prehistory, with the Paléolithique, where cave paintings attest existence of primitive dances.

It acts above all of a ceremonial and ritual act, addressed to a higher entity in order to:

to entreat the fate (dance of the rain)
to give courage (war dance or hunting)
to like the gods (Egyptian, Greek and Roman Antiquity)

The primitive dance, coupled with the songs and the music, had also probably the capacity to insert the participants in a state of fright.

The Antiquity

The ritual act becomes distraction: the esthetism and the communion become dominating at the time of the spectacles and the gatherings. The dance thus becomes an art whose codes will evolve/move with the companies which practice it.

The the Middle Ages

The Rebirth

The 17th century

It is the century of the Ballet from court par excellence, then of the Opéra-ballet and the Comedy-ballet initiated by Lully and Molière.

The 18th century

It is the century of the Danse baroque, called at the time the “Beautiful dance”. The first theorist of the dance, Jean-Georges Noverre, recommends a dance expressing the feelings of the heart, stripped of any artifice, and reforms the ballet by enacting the rules of the Ballet of action.

The 19th century

With the Sylphid appears the romantic Ballet and the preeminence of the light dancer, éthérée, air.

The ballet dancing is codified, in particular by the care of Carlo Blasis and Enrico Cecchetti.

Decline of the ballet in France, development of the great traditional ballets in Russia, Scandinavia and Italy.

The 20th century

The kind renews with the Russian Ballets of Serge de Diaghilev and the appearance of the modern Danse in Germany and with the the United States. Heiress of Merce Cunningham, the Contemporary dance takes her rise at the end of the Années 1970 to develop until today. The bond with all arts seems acquired henceforth. The dance moves away from virtuosity to join the polemical row of art while placing the body like principal medium of expression. It is the time of the performance. The research founded by the young person Vaslav Nijinski, or by Isadora Duncan, seems to continue to reveal other modes of expression via the body. The 20th century changes gives it with the Contemporary dance, which proposes a desire to be renewed unceasingly. The dance joined definitively, and on their own avant-gardes, the literature, painting, the sculpture and sometimes even the policy and philosophy. Many experiments are carried out today to apprehend the field of possible of a body.