WHY DO WE DANCE?
By Dr. Stephen Juan

It is a behaviour found in every society in every part of the world.  Many say it is a terrific form of physical and emotional release.  While doing it, many are proud of how graceful and athletic their bodies look and feel.  Many say they come closest to achieving a total sense of freedom only while doing it.  Many claim they enjoy it best when they do it in public, especially with the right partner. 

The behaviour is dancing. 

Why do humans dance? 

Dancing is a universal form of human expression.  It is a profound means of communication, both intimately and socially.  It synchronizes us with ourselves, one another, and with the natural rhythms of life.

According to Dr. Judith Hanna, a University of Maryland anthropologist and author of the classic study, TO DANCE IS HUMAN (University of Chicago Press, 1987), "we can view dance from a number of different perspectives."  Dr. Hanna lists six important ones.

1) Dance is physical behaviour.  The human body releases energy through muscular responses to stimuli received by the brain.  Organized energy--movement--is the essence of dance.  The body or its parts contract and release, flex and extend, gesture and move from place to place.  The action and the actor are inseparable.  The creator and creation become one.
2) Dance is cultural behaviour.  The values, attitudes, and beliefs of a society determine its form of dance as well as its style, structure, content, physical production, and performance.  The waltz tells us much about Victorian society, just as the break dancing tells us much about the last decade.  Dance gives voice to systems of thought, sustaining them or undermining them through criticisms of institutions, policies, or personages.  Thus action and awareness merge.
3) Dance is social behaviour.  Social life is necessary for human mastery of the environment.  Dance reflects and influences patterns of relationships between individuals in groups and among groups.  Anthropologists call this "social organization".  For example, the dancer may play a specific role with special status, both of which are determined by the socially ordained standards for proper dance behaviour.
4) Dance is psychological behaviour.  Dance involves mental and emotional experiences influenced by and in turn influencing an individual's personal and group life.  Although one can express joy while dancing, it also serves as a means of coping with tensions, frustrations, and aggressive feelings.  In the film, “Saturday Night Fever” (1977), the John Travolta character copes with a mundane life by day through becoming an idolized dancer by night.  Other dance films such as “Flashdance” (1983), “Dirty Dancing” (1987), “Strictly Ballroom” (1992), and “Shall We Dance” (2004) all have main characters who lead double lives through dance.
5) Dance is political behaviour.  Dance is a forum for articulating political attitudes and values.  It is an arena for training which carries over to important positions in other spheres of life.  It is a vehicle of control, adjudication, and change.  Dancing to rock n' roll in the 1950s was a rebellion against the repressions of the post-World War II culture.
6) Dance is communicative behaviour.  This critical behaviour underlies most others.  Dance is a physical instrument for both thought and feeling.  It is also often a more effective medium than verbal language in revealing needs and desires or masking true intent.  Humans, being the multi-sensory beings we are, observe, act, and feel more often than we speak and listen.  The dance medium often comes into play where there is a lack of appropriate verbal expression.  For example, asking someone to dance is often a means of saying "I find you attractive", "I wish to know you better", etc.  One cannot say this in so many words, so one communicates it through dance.  Furthermore, if a couple dance extremely "close" on the dance floor ("if she were any closer, she'd be in back of me", Groucho Marx would say), this symbolizes and communicates to both partners and to any witnesses, the degree of their intimacy.  Just as humans belong to speech communities and share a common verbal language, we move in, and belong to, movement communities--and share a common non-verbal, body language.

This position is perhaps best put by Dr. Marta Robertson of the Department of Music at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania:  “Case studies of dancing from various global traditions (historically, culturally, and geographically) suggest that people dance for various reasons, including the expression of national, political, local, gender, or sexual identities, religious beliefs, or for just plain fun”.   

Beyond this, recent research suggests that, although we may not know why we love to move our bodies to music so such, we strongly suspect that the brain plays a major role in this.  According to Dr. John Krakauer, a neurologist at the School of Medicine at Columbia University, “Music is known to stimulate pleasure and reward areas [of the brain] like the orbitofrontal cortex, located directly behind one’s eyes, as well as a midbrain region called the ventral striatum.  In particular, the amount of activation in these areas matches up with how much we enjoy the tunes.  In addition, music activates the cerebellum, at the base of the brain, which is involved in the coordination and timing of movement.”  Dr. Krakauer goes on to conclude in the September 2008 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN that synchronizing music and movement thus gives the brain “a pleasure double play”.

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In MUSICOPHILIA:  TALES OF MUSIC AND THE BRAIN (Alfred Knopf, 2007), famed neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks suggests that dancing, moving in time to rhythmic music, may be an exclusively human trait.  He also contends that dancing is a recent acquisition of humans and does not have deep evolutionary roots.  He quotes Dr. Aniruddh Patel, a neuropsychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University and author of MUSIC, LANGUAGE, AND THE BRAIN (2007), that “there is not a single report of an animal being trained to tap, peck, or move in synchrony with an auditory beat.”  But others dispute this.  Various birds move in time with music.  So perhaps a more accurate statement might be that humans are the only primates who move to music.  So far we have no examples of chimpanzees, orang-utans, gorillas, or other non-human primates dancing.

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