Jennifer Byerly - Animal Dance

Animal Dance
Dances of imitation can be a powerful method of reflecting the natural world around us. These dances, and in particular dances imitating animals, connect us on a spiritual level with God’s natural domain and help us to see the holy in our everyday surroundings. We have observed that these creatures surrounding us have dances and rhythmic patterns of their own (i.e. the bees video we watched in class) that are used to communicate with others.

This pattern of animals dancing exists in many species, all across the globe. Cranes, monkeys, bees, hens, and many more all exhibits patterns of dancing (15). And some of the oldest primal dance moves may have their roots in the mimicry of animal dances, such as “the round dance and ellipse dance about a post, stepping together and apart, rhythmical stamping of the feet, and the whirling dance about an axis.” (15) Thus the earliest of human expressions may in fact, not be human at all.

This begs the paramount question, “If culture means the manner in which man transforms the world into his human world, then it might appear that we stand confronted by two alternatives: either the dance is not a part of culture, or the animals also possess culture.” (15)

I found an interesting YouTube video that explores these very same concepts of primal/animal dance, and even merges the two together from very distinct traditions. The woman in the interview is a scientist who studies the behavior of birds and also happens to be a dancer and choreographer. She’s now working on a ballet that has aspects of both human and animal dance – in one example she studies an Argentinean bird that dances elaborately with other male birds, all the while a female bird overlooks critically to decide who the better mate would be. Professor Clayton then studied traditional Argentinean dance and noted that tango evolved in much the same way – by bringing the two methods of dance together she seems to have created a beautiful and primal expression of the beauty found both around us, as well as within us.