History of dance

[1] Dance has been an important part of ceremony, rituals, celebrations and entertainment since before the birth of the earliest human civilizations.

Dance may have been used as a tool of social interaction that promoted cooperation essential for survival among early humans.

Studies found that today's best dancers share two specific genes associated with a predisposition for being good social communicators.

When there is a group performance by holding hands or shoulders or even dancing opposite each other makes them feel communicated and bonded.

[3] Many dances of the early periods were performed as a ritual to the gods who ancestors believed needed to be kept entertained for world peace.

Dance evolution started as folk origins to court presentations and now theater or even cinema movies.

[9] Medieval European danses macabres were thought to have protected participants from disease; however, the hysteria and duration of these dances sometimes led to death due to exhaustion.

[11] In European culture, one of the earliest records of dancing is by Homer, whose Iliad describes chorea (χορεία khoreia).

The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, ranked dancing with poetry, and said that certain dancers, with rhythm applied to gesture, could express manners, passions, and actions.

During the reign of the last Mughals and Nawabs of Oudh, dance fell down to the status of 'nautch', an unethical sensuous thing of courtesans.

The important dances of the ancient period were the ceremonial yayue dated to the Zhou dynasty of the first millennium BC.

The art of dance in China reached its peak during the Tang dynasty, a period when dancers from many parts of the world also performed at the imperial court.

Cultural mixed forms of dance, play and drama have served rituals like celebration, mourning and worship.

[19] Ancient Persia was occupied by foreign powers, first Greeks, then Arabs, and then Mongols and in turn political instability and civil wars occurred.

[18] According to the principles of the "cultural revolution" in Iran, dancing was considered to be perverse, a great sin, immoral and corrupting.

Dance masters would teach the steps to nobility and the court would participate in performances as a form of social entertainment.

[21] By the 18th century, ballet had migrated from the French and Italian royal courts to the Paris Opéra under the careful direction of composer/dancer Jean-Baptiste Lully.

Ballet performances developed around a central narrative and contained an expressive movement that revealed the relationships between characters.

Although a more expressive use of the body was encouraged, dancers' movements were still restricted due to heavy materials and corseted dresses.

Noverre urged that costumes be crafted using lightweight fabrics that move fluidly with the body, complementing a dancer's figure.

Naturalistic costuming allowed dancers to push the boundaries of movement, eventually rising en pointe.

The era of Romanticism produced ballets inspired by fantasy, mystique, and the unfamiliar cultures of exotic places.

Ballet as we know it had well and truly evolved by this time, with all the familiar conventions of costume, choreographic form, plot, pomp, and circumstance firmly fixed in place.

The boundaries that classify a work of classical ballet are constantly being stretched, muddied and blurred until perhaps all that remains today are traces of technique idioms such as turnout.

[20] Capoeira was a martial art practiced originally in Africa which the enslaved Africans masked as a form of dance in order to not arouse the suspicion of plantation owners.

The famous "No" manifesto, by Yvonne Rainer, rejecting all costumes, stories and outer trappings in favour of raw and unpolished movement was perhaps the extreme of this wave of thinking.

This event and later Soul Train performances by black dancers (such as Don Cambell) ignited a street culture revolution, in a sense.

For the emergence of 20th-century modern dance see also: Mary Wigman, Gret Palucca, Harald Kreutzberg, Yvonne Georgi, and Isadora Duncan.

Toting the seeds of reggae from his homeland, he is credited with being the first DJ to use two turntables and identical copies of the same record to create his jams.