HISTORY OF THE DANCE

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 51, Issue 132, 17 March 1931, Page 8

HISTORY OF THE DANCE

ORIGIN IN ANCIENT DAYS. . y ' ____ OLD CUSTOMS AND BELIEFS. The origin oE the dance is dealt with in an interesting Avay by Professor Elliott Smith, who lectured recently in England. The professor said that during the last two years he had seen a great variety of dancing in many countries. At a "conference lie attended in Java lie had watched the people collected from a great many islands and from the higher civilised one of Java and Batavia dancing every kind of dance that had been invented from the most primitive dances to the highly sophisticated dances of the Javanese. The Javanese diances were really plays in which epic storiesi of India were acted with a solemnity and reverence that made them like a religious .service. Professor Smith said that many primitive dances were intimately connected with marriage, sacrifice, initiations, and the idea of varous kinds of rebirth.' The root idea was perhaps that the dance reanimated a body from Which life had gone, and this developed into the idea that it brought life into it. " The Spanish gipsies had an old marriage ritual. The bride was swathed like a mummy and placed in a coffin. Then the bridegroom and attendants - danced about to wake her to reannimation. She was set on her feet, and I her bridesmaids, dancing round her as if she was a maypole, unwound the wrappings that bound her. Ritual dancing seemed to go back to the'beginning of agriculture.. The Professor described how the human race, which had probably existed for a million years, roamed about searching for food*, but knowing nothing of the art of cultivation until the time, perhaps about six thousand years ago, when the discovery of how barley could be cultivated transformed the whole of human existence and made settled ife possible. The man who realised that by extending the area of the inundation of the* Nile he could increase the area of cultivation was regarded as having superior powers. Because be could also, by observing the moon and stars, estimate the time when inundation would occur, it was ultimately believed that he made the flood and caused the fertility of the com. Professor Smith put forward the theory that the whole ritual of dancing was associated with the death of this King, known later as Osiris, that his ulispairing people, regarding him as their protector, tried to recreate his body. The whole ritual of dancing centred around the process of mummification. To supply what was lacking in the mummified body libations and perfumes were provided. To re-create the en- / vironment in which he had moved certain incidents in his life were re-enact-ed in dramatic dances. Osiris was later regarded as a god and the creator of the world, but the dance rituals were observed for successive kings.