3.2 Dance as a lifestyle

The motto of one of the famous dance organizations from Hollywood is “Dance isn’t just a hobby, movement is a lifestyle”. Lifestyle is the way we live, how we spend our time, what we dress and what we talk about. Usually is indicated in the activities, interests and opinions.³¹ For instance, Laboskey describes how hip hop became for young people more than entertainment. He points to the four main elements of hip hop, namely, graffiti, rap, breaking and mc mixing. ³² Rajakumar says that all this creates a lifestyle with its own language, style of music, dance and dress.³³ These people wanted to be heard and one way of self-expression, a way of getting “published” for the tagger who may not have other educational or economic resources to establish a presence in the public space was graffiti.³⁴

Analyzing responses from a poll, conducted in 2013 at the local dance school in Magdeburg, there were two questions: 1. What does dance mean for you? 2. What has changed since you began to dance?, the answers were quite similar. Most of the dancers said that since they started to dance, their life completely changed. This is reflected in the style of clothing, the way they feeling music, talking and they even often changed their circle of friends. They became friendly, talkative, kind and emancipated. While they are dancing they forget about time and space as if they would move to another universe where there is nothing but dancing.

By dancing we are seeking for stability and relief from daily stressors. As the sociologist Randy Martin says, “Dance generates a sense of being in the midst of crisis, a break, a rapture, even a loss and a prospect at the same time; thus while dancing may appear to be series of stops and starts, for the dancer, next steps are already in motion, already passing from one balance to the next”³⁵

4. Dance – as a creative processes

According to Duncan, a truly creative dancer is the one who achieves such a degree of understanding that the body displays the soul of this person and whose body dances in accordance with music. ³⁶ Similarly Langer states: “The dance creates an image of nameless and bodiless powers filling a complete, autonomous realm of the World.” ³⁷

Creating movements is “high religious art” ³⁸, it is an improvisation which comes from nowhere and may succeed or not, the result is unpredictable. Like the visual arts, dance shapes movement using principles of spatial design, volume, weight, and texture.³⁹

Every dancer is an artist, who is trying to draw a picture, which should be interesting and understandable for the audience. The mind can operate in completely different languages for instance: dream, music, higher mathematics. Dance is one of those languages.⁴⁰

4.1 Influence of dance on personal development and imagination

Dance culture has a strong influence on personality. It can have many purposes including expression, communication, education, therapy or entertainment and may function in personal, social and spiritual environments.⁴¹ Rajakumar writes on hip hop culture: “Creativity, self-expression, and ability to define one’s identity were important values shared by both graffiti and hip hop dancers.” ⁴² Battles (a situation in which people compete with each other) have been a either an exchange of open-minds or a fight of egos. That is why mostly street dancers worked hard and tried to improve skills, inventing new combinations and movements.⁴³

Another type of dance impact was manifested in such countries as Ethiopia and Italy. The Italian physician S. Bambilla had observed illness among the people of Eritrea and Amhara. The illness was called chebre or ”devil’s illness”. Treatment was carried out as a rite, accompanied with movements and gestures in time to the rhythm of the singing and playing of music provided by a circle of men and women gesticulating madly. During the performance, an attempt is made to drive out the “devil”.⁴⁴

In Apulia Professor Ernesto de Martino studied the illness known as tarantismo. This means that people believed that they were bitten by the tarantula, and who suffered from various emotional disturbances. At home, in the circle of their relatives and friends, to music, the patient was made to dance to exhaustion. Similar practices have been reported from Sicily, from Sardinia and from Spain .⁴⁵ These examples shows how dance could be used in different countries in so interesting and at the same time strange ways.