Dancing is universal among savages; and if a few cases occur which make against this doctrine, one may safely assume, as Ribot does, and even Wallaschek,[[822]] that they are due to insufficient observation,[[823]] or else, at the worst, that they belong to tribes with hardly any claims of humanity, degenerates, retrogrades, who have no social order and consequently no dance. Again, the primitive form of the dance is to be found in the choral throng; but it must be borne in mind that even rudest tribes can develop an art of complicated, traditional, and ritual character,[[824]] which in its turn breeds the solo and the professional artist in dancing. However, the choral dies hard even under civilized conditions; among savages it is prominent everywhere and in full vigour. Waitz,[[825]] speaking of tribes in the South Seas, says that song there is mainly choral, and dancing, affair of the community as a whole, is as universal as song, often passing into mimicry and a rude drama. Everywhere, too, song is accompanied by dancing, and when women thus dance and sing they clap hands or slap the hip in time with their steps and words, after the manner of their sisters in mediæval Europe. Musical instruments are few. Chamisso noted now and then what he took to be degeneration of song into mere howling; but we know there is a more excellent way to explain these festal and cadenced cries. Dancing is in order at each important moment for the community,—when strangers arrive, when war is imminent, at feasts of every sort. As with these natives of the South Sea, so with other and more savage tribes. It is useless to insist in detail upon the African love of dancing, which goes on every evening and in every village for hours at a time. “The natives of Obbo began their dance by all singing together a wild but pleasant-sounding melody in chorus,[[826]]” is only one of many descriptions of this favourite communal diversion; but the legends and the complicated artistic dances which exist side by side with the choral song and the communal dance warn one that while primitive ways survive on the Dark Continent, there is a lower stage of song and dance to be found elsewhere. Like the Botocudos in South America, the Australians are on a quite elementary level with regard to dance and song; they attach more importance to the gesture than to the articulate word, so far as the telling of stories or the describing of events is concerned, and they know scarcely any individual performance.[[827]] Dance and song are of the horde, the clan, as a whole. Choral shouts, refrains which repeat a word or a short phrase indefinitely, and so time the steps of the throng, make the original social art; with the aid of gesture, mimicry of labour, of feats of hunting, this passes into kangaroo-dances, erotic pantomimes, sham fights, and all the rest. Perhaps, as Hirn[[828]] suggests, the dance of the Weddas, or Veddahs, in Ceylon is as primitive as anything of the kind; although Ehrenreich’s account of the Botocudos[[829]] shows little if any advance. A spear is stuck into the ground to serve as centre for the ring of dancers, who move with swaying of legs and arms to the cadence of their own singing,—call it rather shouting,—while they keep exact time by slapping the naked stomach.[[830]] From this communal dance and song, emerges after a while, as in the case of the Botocudos, an individual performer; and it is clear that elaborate dances, such as those given for the benefit of Captain Cook and other foreign visitors, are an outgrowth of this primitive huddling in mass with concert of cries and movements. It is significant that instinct of the clan calls for some concerted dance and song as necessary preface for war or any similar doing of the community as a whole; in long range of development this is the war-dance of our own Indians, often described, where a general chorus serves as background and stimulus alike to the volunteers who step forward singly and promise, in chanted and improvised song that times their steps, deeds of individual valour in the impending fight. So, perhaps, the gab of romance, the gilp or gilpewide[[831]] of Germanic warriors, was originally made not only, as we know it, in the mead hall, but to the chorus of the tribes and with the steps of a dance. At close range, however, and with the foe in sight, it was a communal and general gab, a choral performance; witness the interesting account of Captain Cook.[[832]] In the first voyage, some four hundred islanders, about to attack the captain and his friends, but hesitating, at length “sung the song of defiance and began to dance.” Such was a particular case; and in his general statement, Cook says that New Zealanders, before they begin the onset, “join in a war-song, to which they all keep the exactest time”; and while he does not mention the dance here, it is evidently implied, for his scattered accounts of skirmish and fight are full of it. A curious case is what would seem to be a war-dance in a boat which was attacking Cook’s ship; as it approached, the savages in the boat varied menaces with peaceful talk, “till, imagining the sailors were afraid of them, they began the war-song and dance, and threw stones on board the ship.” Then Cook goes on: “In the war-dance their motions are numerous, their limbs are distorted ... they shake their darts, brandish their spears ... they accompany this dance with a song, which is sung in concert; every strain ending with a loud and deep sigh. There is an activity and vigour in their dancing which is truly admirable; and their idea of keeping time is such that sixty or eighty paddles will strike at once against the sides of their boats, and make only one report.” Concerted singing, this communal initiative, goes not only before war, but before embassies, messages of peace, greetings, and the like; and the dance is clearly an original prop of this song, now and then retained, but often omitted. In Cook’s last voyage,[[833]] “a double canoe, in which were twelve men, came towards us. As they drew near the ship, they recited some words in concert, by way of chorus, one of the number first standing up and giving the word before each repetition,”—a “solemn chant,” Cook calls it. Readers of these and other voyages in the South Seas, know how singing rather than speaking takes the foreground of private as well as of tribal life; a chief coming on board the ship hails it with a song to explain his visit, and there is the case of the islander who told in song his story of life aboard an English ship, and, asking the native who had met him what news there was from home, put his excited questions in rhythm and got the equally excited answers in rapid chant. Behind this individual song is the chorus; with the chorus is nearly always the dance; wherever the dance, there is song. Musical instruments the islanders knew, of course,—drums, perhaps, best; but as Cook says[[834]] of a great dance which was given for him, it did not seem “that the dancers were much assisted by these sounds, but by a chorus of vocal music, in which all the performers joined at the same time.”
Indians of the Western continent have the same tale to tell, and it has been told in part already by Lery, Lafitau, and the older travellers. A century and more ago, Carver[[835]] noted that the savages of North America “usually dance either before or after every meal”;[[836]] and “they never meet on any public occasion, but this makes a part of the entertainment.... The youth of both sexes amuse themselves in this manner every evening.” At the feasts and other dances, “every man rises in his turn, and moves about with great freedom and boldness, singing, as he does so, the exploits of his ancestors. During this the company, who are seated on the ground in a circle, join with him in making the cadence, by an odd tone, which they utter all together, and which sounds ‘Heh, heh, heh.’” This they repeat “with the same violence during the whole of the entertainment.” “The women dance without taking any steps ... but with their feet conjoined, moving by turns their toes and heels.... Let those who join in the dance be ever so numerous, they keep time so exactly with each other that no interruption ensues.”
In recent times the intricate dances, ritual and ceremony which, of course, reach back in far tradition, have been studied and recorded; but this is not a primitive phase of the art,[[837]] and even among the Moqui and Navajo tribes of New Mexico, where instrumental music is common, now and then the dancers furnish their own music, each one rolling out “an aw, aw, aw, aw, in a deep bass tone.”[[838]] So in ancient Mexico, where civilization of a sort had long held sway, the dances “were almost always accompanied by singing”; this, however, was “adjusted by the beating of instruments.”[[839]] But this public dance is no longer communal in the old way; ritual of the clan becomes a state religion, while dance and song are not only lifted but expanded. There is a sense of ritual, to be sure, about the dance of a small community, as when among the Bechuanas, to ask a man “what he dances,” is the same as asking to what clan or tribe he belongs, a phrase curiously akin to Gosson’s remark[[840]] that “to daunce the same round” means to be of the same flock. But all this belongs only to the primitive horde or the late homogeneous community; the dance of such a little clan about their growing crops yielded to traditional and solemn rites, and the spontaneous singing and dancing which Vergil recommends to his farmers[[841]] is really a more primitive stage of the art than the seemingly older ceremony of the Arval brothers, which had already hardened into ritual and belonged to a close corporation under control of the state. Tribal dances become expiatory and religious acts at a very early stage of culture; it is easy to see that the records would preserve such a dance only when it had lost some of its spontaneous character, and taken on a ritual form. Germanic, Slavic, and Romance peoples have the communal dance surviving as a religious act; and it was one of the hardest tasks for councils and bishops to stop this dancing of the congregation within the church itself. Often they allowed it in a modified form. As a part of ritual, choristers still dance before the altar of the cathedral at Seville; sixteen boys in blue and white form “in two eights,” facing each other, and the priests kneel in a semi-circle round them. Then “an unseen orchestra” begins to play, the boys put on their hats and sing the coplas in honour of the Virgin:—
O mi, O mi amada
Immaculada!—
“to a dance measure.” After this they begin to dance, “still singing,” a “kind of solemn minuet.”[[842]] This is done at the feast of the Immaculate Conception. In the sixteenth century boys and girls danced about an image of Christ set upon the altar of German churches, singing Christmas songs, while their parents stood by, also singing and clapping their hands in time with the dance.[[843]] From these good folk to the German barbarians “running in a circle” round the goat’s head and “singing diabolical songs,” as seen and heard by Gregory,[[844]] is no long step backward in development if it is in chronology. When the children were at last driven from the churches, and when the old ring-dance was at last forgotten by their elders, even in the fields and about the fires of St. John’s Eve, the little ones made a brave rescue and kept up the ritual in their games. Now even these are vanishing. Outside of Europe, sacred and even national dances of the throng go this same path of development and decline. The Hebrew communal dance passed into traditional forms;[[845]] and there are other dances, outside of religious cult, which acquire a fixed form and are passed down as of tribal and even national significance. One thinks of the Pyrrhic dance;[[846]] indeed, a study of the sword-dance in all its varieties, and from this double point of view, communal and national, would be of great interest. Savages, as Donovan remarked, imitate in their dancing now the movement of animals, now the clash of arms in war, and again, though not to the extent asserted by Scherer, erotic gestures.[[847]] For the second sort, a gymnastic motive, the sense of preparation and drill for future fighting, and a festal or reminiscential motive, combine to produce such an exercise as the sword-dance, a convenient name for this group, although the sword itself is not always in evidence. Chronology is here of no account; for earliest records may show a well-defined and almost national exercise such as Tacitus noted among the Germans, and very late examples can be found of the purely communal sword-dance, with flyting, songs, refrain, and rustic acting, as in the Revesby Sword Play;[[848]] while Xenophon tells of a little drama, enacted by soldiers of the ten thousand, combining the weapon dance, the imitated fight, and other elements, in terms which could be matched by many an account given by traveller or missionary of a similar affair among quite savage tribes.[[849]] It is easy to see how one of the many paths from this dance of mimicry, exercise, and rhythmic shouting, would lead to the narrative song or ballad, and how such a ballad would long cleave to a particular traditional dance. The Phæacians have a narrative song sung to them as they are dancing, and when two dance alone, tossing the ball,[[850]] “the other youths ... beat time”; but an older and more communal habit is found in the dances of the Faroe islanders, where the gestures and expression of face show how keenly the folk feel what they sing;[[851]] in the Icelandic rimur, narrative songs which went with the dance; on the Cimbrian peninsula, where ballads about the battle of Hemmingstede were used for the same purpose; in scattered rural communities[[852]] of Europe; and among savage tribes the world over. It has been made clear to probation how the narrative ballad grew out of a tribal or communal dance; and it is equally clear that there was an even shorter path from dance to drama.[[853]]
From this point of view, it is easy to understand why the dance plays such a part in the beginning of nearly every national literature, not only in the Dionysian origins of Greek drama, but in less obvious ways. The same ecstasy, indeed, appears again and again in a kind of panic dance; in the summer of 1374 along the Rhine and in the Netherlands, and again in 1418 at Strassburg, communal excitement went quite mad in the St. John’s or the St. Vitus’s dance, vast crowds of men and women leaping and shouting, garlanded, singing, as they reeled, a refrain which might belong to the usual dances of St. John’s Eve:—
Here Sent Johan, so, so,
Vrisch ind vro,
Here Sent Johan!