It is always a pleasure when a bunch of my interests coalesce in one place. Last week’s New York Times science section contained a story that brought together six of them: Israel, history, anthropology, archeology, art and dance.
The article discussed the findings and theories of an Israeli archeologist, Dr. Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been studying carved stones and paintings on pottery from sites in the Balkans and the Middle East, dating between 9,000 and 5,000 years ago — the era when cultures in these regions were making the transition from hunting-gathering to agriculture, but before the rise of states.
Garfinkel found that many of these art works show people in poses that suggest dance — in circles, holding hands; or in small groups with arms up. If Garfinkel’s interpretations are correct, these are the earliest known records of human beings dancing.
As a musician and dancer in the local international folk dance community, I was both delighted by this article and curious about a peculiarity of a lot of archeologists’ and anthropologists’ work. They have a tendency to interpret the remains of pre-literate societies as having religious or ritual significance. Indeed, they apparently tend to turn to that first unless there is some powerful reason not to.
Therefore, to Garfinkel, the figures show that dancing “was part of the ritual for coordinating a community’s activities…. In periods before schools and writing, community rituals, symbolized by dance, were the basic mechanisms for conveying education and knowledge to the adult members of the community and from one generation to the next.”
I’m certainly in no position to challenge Garfinkel’s archeological scholarship. Neither do I want to deny that dance can be or has been part of a community’s religious rituals or can be an educational tool.
Jewish tradition itself has plenty of indications of this. According to the Encyclopedia Judaica’s article “Dance”: “In the communal and religious life of the Jewish people, dance was always regarded as an expression of joy and religious ecstasy.” The Bible contains famous scenes of Miriam dancing at the Sea of Reeds and King David dancing before the Ark; and Psalms 149 and 150 exhort Jews to praise God with dance.
There is also a tradition going back to the Bible about dance being a source of prophetic and mystical insight. A wonderful Hasidic story I read in a book on meditation illustrates this: A famous Hasidic rabbi once visited a Russian shtetl. The people were eager to hear him and had long pondered what questions to ask him about the spiritual problems in their lives. But when they gathered, the rabbi, feeling the tension in the room, instead of speaking led them in singing a niggun, then in an ecstatic dance, in which all the villagers’ spiritual problems were dissolved and healed. And when the dance ended, the rabbi said, “I trust I have answered all your questions.”
Nevertheless, I find something uncomfortably puritanical about the emphasis on these aspects of dance. To me, they are good, but secondary. The first fact about dance to me is that it is an intense pleasure, great fun, both to dance myself and to watch others dancing.
And I can’t help but wonder if hunting for other significance misses the obvious. Which came first, the sheer pleasure of rhythmic movement or the desire to make it significant? Did Garfinkel’s villagers think, “The harvest is due; let’s show our children how important that is and praise our gods by dancing”? Or did they first think, “The harvest is due; our work is rewarded. Let’s party!” and only later think, “This feels so wonderful, we should use it to teach our children and praise our gods”?
Don’t take my word for it. Purim, that most giddy of Jewish festivals, seems a good time to invite Chronicle readers to experience the joy of dance yourselves. There are Israeli folk dance classes, ballroom and international folk dance classes and groups, performing dance companies all over Milwaukee and the state. As the Bible’s otherwise sardonic book of Ecclesiastes says in chapter three: “To everything there is a season,” including “a time to dance.”
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