HISTORY OF THE DANCE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20810, 28 February 1931, Page 3 (Supplement)

HISTORY OF THE DANCE.

ORIGIN IN ANCIENT DAYS. OLD CUSTOMS AND BELIEFS. The origin of the dance is dealt with in an interesting way by Professor Elliot 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 he had attended in Java he had watched the people collected from a great many islands and from the higher civilisation of Java and Batavia dancing every kind of dance that had been invented, from the most primitive dances to tha highly sophisticated dances of the Javanese. The Javanese . dances were really plays in which epic stories 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 various 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 about a change into a hew life. The Spanish gipsies had an old marriage ritual. The bride was swathed like a mummy and placed in a coflin. Then the bridegroom and attendants danced about to wake her to reanimation. She. was set on her feet, and her bridesmaids, dancing round her as if she were a maypole, unwound the wrappings that bound her. Ritual dancing seemed to back to the beginning of agriculture. The Professor described how the human race, which had probably existed for a million vears, 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 life possible. The man who realised that by extending the area of inundation of the Nile he could increase the area of cultivation was regarded as having superior powers. Because he could also, by observing the moon and stars, estimate when inundation would occur, it. was ultimately believed that he made the flood and caused the fertility of the corn. „ , ~ _ 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 despairing 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 environment in which he had moved certain incidents in his life were re-enacted 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. '