Anthropologist Richard Katz reports on a drum dance that the !Kung people in the Kalahari Desert perform.
At some point in the cycle, the drummers stop drumming and the audience and performers sing and dance together.
[5] Anthropologist Gertrude Prokosch Kurath watched drum dances at the Six Nations reserve and reported that the dance had four major parts: (1) an introduction, (2) the procession of dancers into the longhouse followed by singing, (3) a set of chants and prayers, and (4) a recapitulation of part 2, the singing phase.
[7] The drum dance [fr] and throat singing are two traditional forms of Inuit music.
[7] Inuit drum dance songs, or pisiq,[7] are typically based on a five-note scale.
[7] Copper Inuit use the drum dance "to honour members of the family, to express gratitude, and to welcome and bid farewell to visitors".
[16] Vennum uses the word "society" to describe the groups that perform the grass and drum dances.
[7] Nicole Beaudry, describing a Yup'ik drum dance she saw in Alaska in the late 1980s, says that there were four or five drummers who sat together on a bench, singing, surrounded by dancers.