DANCE AS A SACRED CULT

Abstract

The question this article poses is: when is the dance sacred? To frame an adequate answer to this question one must tease out all the variables involved in it. The prime variable is the dance
itself, and there have been many interpretations of its nature, e.g. as instinctive, as a response to emotion, as an expression of man's spirit. There are also many other factors which influence the forms it may take, including geographical, cultural and ideological ones. Because I am focussing on sacred dance, it is the ideological factors which are of special interest to me in this article. The aim of this article is to explain the idea that the form of dance which is acceptable in any given conceptual system from those presented by psychological reductionists to the transcendent systems of Hinduism and Catholicism, is relative to the way each system perceives the nature of the locus of the sacred within it. The possible forms of dance can perhaps be best examplified on a continuum: from dance forms which are consciously controlled to those which are ecstatic, a state in which the movement and the man are out of control. feeling of social solidarity.