The cosmic dance

The performance of ancient dance is largely irrecoverable. Any attempt to recover it involves many technical problems and this essay does not make the attempt. Nor will I provide an encyclopaedic summary of information and views about ancient dance in its immense variety in time and place. My main focus will be on the ways in which the functions and the associations of dance in ancient society differ from those of dance in modern society. A crucial place in this argument will be occupied by theatrical dance.

In Hindu religion Shiva dances the Anandatandava (the dance of bliss), symbolizing the cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, the rhythms of birth and death and the perennial movements of the cosmos. In the hymns of the Veda, the dawn, Ushas, is described as a dancer who appears on a stage. This has no parallel in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. But in Sophocles' Antigone the chorus invoke Dionysus as a choragos (dance-leader) of the fire-breathing stars (1146-7). Plato (Timaeus 40c) describes the heavenly bodies with their 'juxtapositions and their approximations...circling as in dance', and in another work ascribed to Plato the stars are said to move 'through the figures of the fairest and most glorious of dances' (Epinomis 982e). Five centuries later Lucian writes that: