Dancing Makes Us More Alive by Nell Porter Brown

(From the Harvard alumni magazine thanks to a student. I have edited for this blog.)

In primitive cultures throughout the world, dance brought communities together in a common purpose, says jazz master Wynton Marsalis, Ar.D. ’09, Dances requested rain or a successful hunt or battle, opened paths to gods and other spirits, promoted fertility and gender identity. They taught “our young the meaning of sexuality as they entered adulthood,” he said. “Dancing sanctified our space. It could heighten our sense of being alive by making us one with the very ground we danced on, the air we breathed, and the seen and the unseen.”

Dance was, and is, a unique and essential human activity that connects us to the musical rhythms of life. “Unlike rowing a boat or chopping wood, in dancing you became more of yourself as you became one with others. You almost never got tired because your spirit soared the more you danced — because this was play.” Proving that point, his four-and-a-half hour presentation on the history of social dance and music in America was punctuated by dazzling performances, from the cakewalk, minuet, waltz, and fox trot to tap, tango, the Charleston, the lindy hop, the mashed potato, merengue, cha cha, and the twist.

Marsalis said social partner dancing allowed “a glimpse into another soul, if only for a moment, through the exuberance of motion.” He took a year to research the origins of popular dance, clarifying for him what social dancing has contributed to culture. “It was competition, cooperation, and consciousness,” he noted. Dance “is and was and will always be community in action. Although life is no cakewalk, people are going to dance no matter what, because it makes us more alive.”