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What is Dance? by John Niemi

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What is Dance? by John Niemi

What is dance? I suspect I will spend the rest of my life and career answering this question. When dance happens may be a more interesting question to ask. I think dance happens when three things intersect: intent, setting (immediate space or location) and context (broader social, political, religious, community culture.) It may be the inspiration of movement when someone feels joy or sadness, it may be when a community moves together, or it may even be a formal concert presentation. In each of these creative movement experiences is an intent to dance, a setting where it happens and a context in which it occurs which make it dance.

John A. Niemi, MA is a first year doctoral student in the Department of Dance at Texas Woman’s University.

What is Dance? by Jen Stone

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Dance is the organization of the body, mind and spirit through space. Sometimes it’s blurry, sometimes it’s perfectly clear. It’s always exerting. Dance is a love affair with kinetic energy, momentum and self expression. It is the language of the primal being; the human animal in its wildest beauty and its grounded simplicity. Dance is in time, in space, fleeting, unpredictable, alive and then gone. It lives only through a performer. Dance is dependent on whoever cares or dares to put it on. Without a committed performer the dance will die. Or never be born.

Jen Stone is a dancer, a teacher, and a Mom who lives in rural Virginia.

What is Dance? by John Borstel

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What is Dance? by John Borstel

The attempt to find a definitive definition of dance is probably as old as dance itself, and that’s pretty old. But think about these possibilities:

Dance is movement aware of itself.
Dance is spontaneous movement discovered.

Dance is a birthright.
Dance is a disciplined art-form that people spend lifetimes refining.

Dance is a multidisciplinary form that can incorporate movement with text, stories, music, costumes, environments, film, video, masks, mud, fans, sequins, and so on.
Dance is what happens when movement is stripped to its essence.
Dance engages the body as a whole.
Dance engages the body in its smallest moving parts.
Some people dance most when they get their tractors to dance (or their banners, their airplanes, their dogs, their cranes, their computers.)

Dance is a communal form rooted in the interaction of minds, spirits, and moving bodies.
Dance begins in solitude.

Dance is a highly structured activity employing patterns, disciplines, protocols, techniques, and codes.
Dance does not require rules.

Dance is spiritual, political, intellectual, medicinal, emotional, communal, individual, creative, imitative, codified, free.

Dance is any combination of the above at once.

John Borstel is Director of Humanities for the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange.

What is Dance? by Ken Manheimer

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is a progression of movements, and spaces between movements, where
those that come later agree in vital ways with what those that came
before. What distinguishes dance from other activities that involve
this quality is that it is at dance’s center.

in choreographed dance, the progressions are in some way designed
ahead of time.

in improvised dance, the progression and its unfolding is
discovered along the way.

in improvised collaborative dance, the partners share the discovery
process, together developing their dance as they dance it (and, as
it dances them.)

more briefly, dance is a container for realizing and growing forms in
which enjoyable engagement with movement thrives.

Ken Manheimer likes contact improvisation and computers very much (but not at the same time.)

What is Dance? by Stephen Clapp

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The potential of this question draws me to respond with more questions: What can dance be? Or what can be dance? It seems, by the nature of the question, that there is a general assumption that dance is many things to many people, depending quite subjectively on any particular individual’s relationship to dance. Thus, based on my own personal relationship to dance, a brief response to this question may take the shape of the following dance:
a physical or emotional transition,

a stillness that resides in
an awareness of kinesthetic potential,

an idea, image or vision as
it becomes real or fades away,

a conversation among
two or more or less
expressive tendencies,

a sense of consciousness that allows
for ever-evolving change,

any traveling particle or idea
moving or caught,

Stephen Clapp is a dance artist, choreographer, theater artist, composer, writer, arts educator, cultural activist and arts administrator living in Mount Rainier, Maryland with life and dance partner, Laura Schandelmeier and 10 year old Holly Rae.

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