music + dance = world domination! (as long as you keep your elbows rotated)
My mom (who, I guess, is stateside once more) sent me a link to this NY Times op ed piece by Daniel J. Leviten, author of This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. The op ed bit has to do with the way music and dance work together in our reptile brains, so that we're wired to move when we hear music, even when we're sitting still. While I think his complaints about the artificiality of the concert hall gloss over the social, economic, and class reasons why we have an elite tradition of art music performed in concert halls for quiet, unmoving audiences, I did like a lot of what he said about how innate dance is to us as advanced monkeys, and why it's inseparable from music. The last paragraph I quote below speaks particularly well to some of what I find so compelling in ATS (and what I try to emphasize to my dance students when explaining why we have cues and set moves.)
Through tens of thousands of years of evolutionary history, music has nearly always occurred together with dance. Even today, most of the world’s languages use a single word to mean both music and dance. The indivisibility of movement and sound, the anthropologist John Blacking has noted, characterizes music across cultures and across times. ...
The ancient connections between music and movement show up in the laboratory. Brain scans that I and my colleagues have performed make it clear that both the motor cortex and cerebellum - the parts of the brain responsible for initiating and coordinating movements - are active during music listening, even when people lie perfectly still. Singing and dancing have been shown to modulate brain chemistry, specifically levels of dopamine, the “feel good” neurotransmitter.
Our species uses music and dance to express various feelings: love, joy, comfort, ceremony, knowledge and friendship. And each one is distinct and widely recognized within cultures. Love songs cause us to move slowly and fluidly, for example, while songs of joy inspire us to dance in a full-body aerobic way.
Our ancient forebears who learned to synchronize the movements of dance were those with the capacity to predict what others around them were going to do, and signal to others what they wanted to do next. These forms of communication may well have helped lead to the formation of larger human communities.
(The full article is here.)
So to anyone who says they can't dance or can't follow music: evolution says otherwise, bitches. Get up and move already. :)
Through tens of thousands of years of evolutionary history, music has nearly always occurred together with dance. Even today, most of the world’s languages use a single word to mean both music and dance. The indivisibility of movement and sound, the anthropologist John Blacking has noted, characterizes music across cultures and across times. ...
The ancient connections between music and movement show up in the laboratory. Brain scans that I and my colleagues have performed make it clear that both the motor cortex and cerebellum - the parts of the brain responsible for initiating and coordinating movements - are active during music listening, even when people lie perfectly still. Singing and dancing have been shown to modulate brain chemistry, specifically levels of dopamine, the “feel good” neurotransmitter.
Our species uses music and dance to express various feelings: love, joy, comfort, ceremony, knowledge and friendship. And each one is distinct and widely recognized within cultures. Love songs cause us to move slowly and fluidly, for example, while songs of joy inspire us to dance in a full-body aerobic way.
Our ancient forebears who learned to synchronize the movements of dance were those with the capacity to predict what others around them were going to do, and signal to others what they wanted to do next. These forms of communication may well have helped lead to the formation of larger human communities.
(The full article is here.)
So to anyone who says they can't dance or can't follow music: evolution says otherwise, bitches. Get up and move already. :)