Dance

Movement organised in time and space.

Dance is purposeful movement organised in time and space, performed for expression, ritual, social participation or performance. It is among the oldest art forms and one of the hardest to preserve, because until recently it had no durable notation.

Elements used to analyse dance

• Body — which parts move, and what shapes they make.
• Action — travel, jump, turn, gesture, stillness.
• Space — level, direction, pathway, size, relationship to others.
• Time — tempo, rhythm, duration, whether movement is metred or free.
• Energy — weight, flow, tension, how a movement is performed rather than which movement it is.

Genres

Ballet is codified, with a vocabulary named in French and a technique built on turnout and verticality. Modern and contemporary dance grew as deliberate departures from that vocabulary, working with weight, floor and release. Folk and social dance are participatory rather than presentational. Street styles developed outside institutions and carry their own lineages and battles.

Recording movement

Dance vanishes as it happens. Notation systems — Labanotation and Benesh being the main two — record movement symbolically on a stave, but both are laborious and read by few. Video is now the practical record, though it flattens space and fixes a single viewpoint on a three-dimensional form.