The Nomadic Alternative – Page 182

Of spring. Voodoo dancers discover God in their muscles. And pinioned in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe, the Hasidim found that the steps of the dance led them to escape the mordacity of everyday existence, to love even their enemies, and to recover the lost Kingdom of Judah.

Dancing on sacred mountain-tops facilitated the flow of divine inspiration. Samuel enjoined Saul to meet the prophets "coming down from the high places with a psaltery, a tabret and a pipe and a harp ... and thou shall be turned into another man". Every other midwinter Greek votaries of Dionysus clambered up the ice-bound ramparts of Mount Parnassus to dance on the summit. The rarified air, the nearness of the deity, the potency of the kettle-drum and wailing flute, the strenuousness of the exercise, and the contrast between the inner heat of their bodies and the outer cold of the snows, propelled these oreibasics into states of ecstasy. To culminate this brief return to the most savage state, with their nails and teeth they ripped at the steaming, quivering carcass of a votive animal, imagining a benefit from their communion with hot fresh blood. The Greeks found that 'heartbeat' music in the Phrygian mode induced fits of weeping and trance but cured faintness, loss of reason, epilepsy - and sciatica. Plato recognized the beneficial effects of these cathartic expeditions. "Music", he said, "is good for anxiety states".* The Pygmies believe all rhythmic singing and dance to be good - all dissonance and random noise to be bad.

The Dance is a miniature journey and the dance floor or stage a miniature territory in which to travel. People dance more in times of distress. The terror at the time of the French Revolution prompted the City of Paris to embark on a dancing spree unprecedented since those morbid exhibitions identified with St. Vitus, which infected Europe in the aftermath of the Black Death. Slaves, low caste labourers, the oppressed, disoriented and depressed recover a fragment of their humanity and imagine their dance-steps lead the way to the lost state of primaeval innocence.

[illegible] E.R. Dodds, Introduction to Euripides 'Bacchae', Oxford University Press, 1960, pp. xiii ff.