Poets and Artists lose no occasion to inform us that our age is marked by man's alienation from his neighbors. Paul Halmos illustrates how alienation is mirrored in changing dancing habits. Dancing began as a choral enterprise involving the entire community.
. . .It effectively served to share the burdens and deepend the bonds of fellow feeling as well as providing catharsis through rhythmic communal rapture. Choral dances were still practices as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but no longer as the total communal experiences they had been. They were steadily replaced by couple dances in which the group was divided into individual couples. The cotillion-quadile type of square dances represented a link between the choral and the couple dances. Halmos believed that the couple dance may still serve sexual and matrimonial purposes, but these are not neccessarily communal purposes. The couples arrive en duex and rarely join others among the dancers.
from "Personal Space" Pg 60
Posted by delpesco at February 18, 2004 01:39 PM