The sea gypsies danced with the music they made. When I visited a sea gypsy woman who was dancing along with the music of the human voice and the beating of the drums, her eyes were closed as her hips swayed from side to side in harmony with the rhythm. It reminded me of old Hawaiian films where women swayed their hips along with the breeze of the tropics. As the woman's hips swayed, her arms made rolling wavy motions at her side. Her feet rotated as she shifted her balance.
There's an African Bambuti Pygmy expression that says "One dances as one drinks, as one eats, it is a necessity." When the explorer Alyette De Munck tells of his experience with the Bambuti Pygmies, who spend large parts of their day making and playing music with their drums and flutes, he explains that "Everything of any importance is expressed in dance be it sad or gay: the full moon, a death, a birth, a successful hunt, the coming of a friend. Thus the pygmies free themselves from care -- an illness, a spell, a quarrel --or let out the full force of their joy. All ages mix together, even very old women like Ghana, Bahana's aged wife.
Dancing styles were diverse throughout the various Australian tribal groups. Generally when Aborigine danced they used their whole bodies including their arms and legs in set dances. They also did a lot of foot stomping that the Australians now call "shake a leg".
Good male dancers enjoyed high status and reputation among the people. These "Dancemen" specialized in miming the movements of animals that represented the clans various totem animals. Dancing along with song can last for long periods of time from a few days and up to months.
Ritualistic or sacred dancing is a form of dancing connected to their religion called "Dreamtime". These dancers were connected to their totem animals. In this Shamanic dancing there was lots of arm, foot, and body jive that were imitations of the movements of animals. Like Native Americans, Aborigines wore headdresses and body decorations to liven up their ceremony. There were dances for many reasons, much like the Bambuti pygmies. They danced for "Dreaming" events, for rain like Native Americans did, and for successful hunting like the Bambuti do.
What was the first dance like among our ancestors? Who invented dancing? Did someone just begin to jump around in African Savannah excitement after hearing a rhythmic song celebrating the moment? According to the definition of dancing it may be an old tradition. The definition of dancing is to move the body rhythmically in time with stimulating and ordered sounds. It is an emotional reaction to sound. Other animals move their bodies in courting mating ritual and they even create noise that sounds like music; birds, for example, dance and whistle in rhythmic order to communicate. Bees move their bodies in order to communicate where honey is being stored. Of course, dancing for the specific conscious reason to entertain oneself is a human act. Babies will move in rhythm to music from a very early age. When they are first born, they can't control their physical movements at all...they are almost a year old before they've got it down, and a child is several months old before it can reach out and grab something without struggling. But as soon as they can, all they need is the first few notes of a song and they'll dance. Even at only a few days old my friends' baby, Serenity, would wiggle around really funny to music. When she was born, she had her biological clock all messed up, and would stay up all night and sleep all day. Her pediatrician recommended making the daytime bright, loud, and busy and the nighttime tranquil and darker. More than anything, music helped her out. Her mother would play fast, "perky" music during the day, and then calmer, slow rhythmic music at night. For the fast music she giggled, played, danced, even tried singing. For the slower music, she would become mellow and relaxed, until eventually she would doze off. That one of a baby's first instinctual movements was to dance is fascinated.
Paleolithic cave paintings from more than 10,000 years ago illustrate stick-like figures dancing. In the Paleolithic "three brothers" cave of France there is a painting of a Shamanic figure over 13, 000 years old who seems to be dancing in animal costumes. The aborigines were painting figures in dance for thousands of years.
Dancing is interesting phenomenon. Why do we humans do it? We dance sometimes in order to communicate. It is also a method of gaining morale and levels of confidence and optimism in our hunting and gathering past. In the case of the pygmies of the African Congo forest we see dancing for the purposes of manipulating nature. The Aborigines dance in order to manipulate the weather as the Native Americans did.
Dance is also a communicative process that communicates sexuality. Our music is often sexual in content and we often tend to dance in paired groups of males and females in a sexual fashion. So dancing may in fact be a vertical expression of a horizontal desire.
Simply put, dancing is enjoyable and it creates the sensation of pleasure. Especially when you do it horizontally. Dancing in groups also creates the sense of community within groups and social connection as we know creates mental health and positive healthy states of mind.
According to the nature of dancing it would seem that this cultural adaptation and hunting and gathering behavior would naturally be a therapeutic tool.
The American Dance Therapy Association defines Dance therapy as "the psychotherapeutic use of movement as a process that furthers the emotional, cognitive, social and physical integration of the individual." Dance is expressive and communicative on a non-verbal level. In psychotherapy it helps with the process of communicating emotional ideas that may be harder to verbalize. It is a basic communication tool and therefore it is effective in psychotherapy, which attempts to help one understand one's own self more. Dance therapists work in a variety of ways. They work in the same traditional psychotherapeutic style, yet they teach people to get off Freud's couch and dance at appropriate times. Movement is the medium therapists use for non-verbal analysis, diagnosis, and interaction. The therapists work in hospitals, private clinics, schools, drug addiction centers, etc.
Dancing is a basic technique to decrease stress. Dance is physical and so it has a powerful effect on the body, and therefore the mind. It is exercise; it stretches our muscles, loosens joints, increased circulation, oxygen rationing to the brain. When dancing we express non-verbal positive emotional states. It simply is a natural way to get "high". So in essence this behavior can be preventative and promote psychological homeostasis.
A ballet dance teacher by the name of Joan Chodorow tells of some of her first experiences when she started to see the mind-altering effects of dance therapy in her book "Dance Therapy and Depth Psychology". It was one of the convincing experiences she had that persuaded her to become a therapist herself. She says, "...my world turned around completely when I was asked to teach a group of three-year-olds. They were too young to learn any kind of ballet technique, so I had to find a new way of working. As I watched them I realized that everything they did was mirroring of the world of movement; while they were watching something they would imitate it...they liked bugs. So we paid careful attention to the bugs we found and developed a series of bug walks...we pretended to be every kind of wild animal. We danced our pets...we danced being caterpillars and wove ourselves into cocoons where we slept peacefully until it was time to emerge out of the cocoon and emerge as butterflies..."
This behavior of imitating animals is interesting. It is something that hunter/gatherer cultures have been doing for a long time, as we have seen in the example of the aborigines in their totem dancing. These children certainly found themselves connecting to an old tradition of Shamanism and positive behavior modification.
Later Joan Chodorow tells of one of her first experiences of Dance Therapy in a center for autistic children. When explaining what it was like when she began to see the use of dance as therapy she writes, "At that time I had no psychological training. The first day I went up to the sixth floor of a very old building. The doors were locked. About 15 children between the ages of 3 to 12 were in treatment there. Most of them were psychotic. Some were blind, some were deaf...One child...did his very best to stuff (a toy) into his mouth. Another child walked around, perhaps 8 years old saying in monotone 'I'm very angry. I'm a very angry boy.' There was lots of activity...Somehow I had the sense that if I could just put on wonderful music it would change everything. As I remember it I put on a Russian Hopak record onto a record player...the children liked the music...we just started running around. We were stomping and clapping. Now one of the boys who had been climbing the radiators joined us. Since that was becoming the most interesting thing going on, I, too, got down on my hands and knees and the rest of the children followed. I hoped we would be scrambling in some kind of synchrony, but then a little girl wandered off, one of the children on her toes, and her eyes rolled back. Hoping to invite her back, I put on Debussy Classical music that sounds like clouds... the energy kept us connected...and the session ended...When it was over some of the children clapped and cheered. The chief psychiatrist had been watching through the one-way glass. Someone reported his comments to me. 'The children have never gotten such good exercise. She's a gem hire her' The following years were a major transition time" It was an accident that Joan found herself becoming an advocate for dance therapy, and much of it is due to her intuitive, yet scientific, ability to sense the need of these children to express themselves in this mind altering way. It was after alteration of their psychotic conditions.
Dancing is a free medicinal treatment not only for children; we all can self medicate by just pressing the power button on our stereos and releasing some of our adult conditioning. To apply Music Therapy put music on that you like and then move your body.
Dance and music therapy are related. One can even suggest that dance is an extension of music. Combining the physical aspects of dance and the psychological aspects of music in a natural setting creates a truly holistic therapy to experience dance as our ancestors experienced dance. The anthropologist and Shaman, Dr Michel Harner, teaches "dancing your animal". His technique is derived from a universal type of dance seen in most tribal cultures. Shamans usually have spiritual totem animals that represent the tribe, similar to the way a mascot will represent an athletic team.
Dance Therapy

African Dance Class
To do this dance, you can use the drum exercise taught at the end of the last chapter. Dr. Harner uses a rattle, but the drum will work just as well and if you don't have a drum yet you can use a plastic wastebasket instead. He says to begin your beat about the same as your heartbeat, "about 60 times per minute, moving your feet in the same tempo. Move slowly and in free form around the room, trying to pick up the feeling of having some kind of mammal, bird, fish, reptile, or a combination of these. Once you pick up the sense of some such animal, concentrate on it and slowly and slowly move your body in accordance with being that animal. You are now touching the Shamanic State of Consciousness. Be open to experiencing the emotion of that animal and don't hesitate to make cries and noises of it...after 5 minutes shift to 100 beats per minute...after four minutes walk like the animal and then decrease the tempo to 60 beats per minute.
Again, this is best done in nature with friends. So if you get the chance try going on a camping trip or taking a hike with some drums to find a sacred spot to dance.