This is a follow up to my previous post on the challenges of raising boys.
Watch this video
And this one
and this
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I’ve wondered why every culture in the world has some sort of dance tradition. Often, these are group dances, for men and women. Is there an evolutionary basis for dance? Does it serve a purpose such as for finding fit mates and perpetuating genes - certainly, (male) birds display and dance to impress potential mates. As the Aeon article cited below asked, despite Christian and Islamic efforts to eradicate tribal dances for over a millennia, why does traditional dance persist in so many countries?
From Live Science:
A study published in the Public Library of Science’s genetics journal in 2006 suggested that long ago the ability to dance was actually connected to the ability to survive.
According to the study, dancing was a way for our prehistoric ancestors to bond and communicate, particularly during tough times. As a result, scientists believe that early humans who were coordinated and rhythmic could have had an evolutionary advantage.1
Recent evidence for such a thesis is gathering across scientific and scholarly disciplines. Time and again, researchers are discovering the vital role played by bodily movement not only in the evolution of the human species, but in the present-day social and psychological development of healthy individuals. Moreover, it is not just bodily movement itself that registers as vital in these cases, but a threefold capacity: to notice and recreate movement patterns; to remember and share movement patterns; and to mobilise these movement patterns as a means for sensing and responding to whatever appears. This threefold capacity is what every dance technique or tradition exercises and educates..2
Recently, I read ‘The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma’ by Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. He has treated thousands of patients suffering from PTSD. 3
Dr. Van der Kolk dislikes the term ‘alternative treatment’ for activities like team sports, yoga, dance and other forms of movement that have the ability to rewire the brain and heal from trauma.
Communal dances are thus a great way for ensuring the mind-body connection. Movement makes people healthy. For girls, they lead to body positivity and an affirmation of their natural born feminine traits. Men dance too, but their dances are an expression of virile fitness, rather than of grace.
This brilliant research paper from the Univ of Colorado and University of Oxford is worth reading in its entirety. 4
Schmais and White (1970) have noted that rhythm has always been the vehicle for connecting people in almost every aspect of their daily lives. Historically, people of various ages have united to dance before harvests and hunts, to proclaim war and to celebrate important events.
The goddess cultures used dance as a primary way of activating, celebrating and ensuring fertility – from human reproduction to the output of the continuation of all life (Sjöö and Mor 1991; Gimbutas 1982, 2001).
As modern western culture put more emphasis on output and productivity, this expression and celebration of the feminine as a conscious, expressed and valued ideal declined and almost disappeared. The prominence of the male qualities of competition and dominance resulted in women’s innate and essential natures being devalued with a tendency to dominate or suppress the feminine rather than experience it as the very source of life itself (Mies 1986).
The conclusion of the pilot study states;
In the pilot research presented here into the transformative effects of sensual dance with women, additional elements were added to the body of outcomes already recorded in traditional dance research literature. These include ecstatic feelings and the discovery/rediscovery of a deep identity experi-enced as sensuality and freedom to express this renewed part of themselves in all parts of their lives. Women reported experiencing an innate ability to use bodily sensations as a refreshing way to self-soothe inwardly and also to express themselves more authentically outwardly. This was felt to have incorporated into their selves, the ability to invoke and radiate a sense of sacredness through the body – a deliverance from the day to day-ness of things.
and
Women participating in the programme of Sensual Movement and Dance
over the past ten years have consistently reported a compelling desire to
understand and explore the sense of themselves as women. Specifically, they
have expressed an immense curiosity and excitement about their sensuality/
sexuality, whether they are a blossoming teenage girl or a grown woman. At
the same time, participants routinely couple their curiosity and excitement
with varying degrees of shame and/or repression.
This is speculation, but I feel that much of the epidemic of gender-confusion that seems to be abnormally present in girls can be resolved if parents and educational institutions affirm their feminity through dance and movement.
If you want to raise a healthy girl, teach her how to dance. Even better, teach her how to dance with groups of other girls & women.
Why Do Humans Dance?, Denise Chow, Live Science, March 2010
The dancing species: how moving together in time helps make us human, Kimerer LaMothe, Aeon, June 2019
‘The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma’, Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Penguin, 2014.
Reconnecting to the feminine: Transformative effects of Sensual Movement and Dance, Fasulo, Lurquin, and Bodekar, Dance Movement and Spiritualities, July 2016