HISTORY OF DANCE Ι
Dance in Ancient Greece
The Creation of the universe started as a dance So said the ancients and identified its motion with Eros, the universal counter-balancing law, that regulates the admirable co-existence of celestial bodies, so that they all advance, swirl in a non-ending rhythm, undeterred in their trajectory Concurrent is the meaning of theion, i.e. divine, derived, according to Plato’s Cratylus, from the verb théō, to run, hence to position, to order, to regulate, to revolve. Also, the action of Zeus, the great Arbiter, who inter-balances the viotos, i.e. life, to distinguish it from chaos and monstrosity, creating order, harmony, ideal conditions for existence. The ancient Greeks used the noun khorós (dance) and the verbs orkhéomai or khoreúō (khorevo), i.e. to dance. For them, the verb khorevo meant to execute rhythmic motions, in tune with both music and verse. In his Laws (book B), Plato says that dance is identified with education and that a man without choir-training is the uneducated, while the well-educated man will be able both to sing and dance well. Orchestes is the dancer, but also the warrior in Homeric language, and the great poet makes it clear that when using the word in this sense, he does so with a laudatory intention. Lucian claimed that warriors, through dance training, become more capable for fighting, for shoving and thrusting, for complex action, and bending movements. Have no fear, advised Lucian, for the dancer who knows how to fall on the ground and then rise with ease . What adversary can confront this warrior? … And when someone dies, so heroically and gallantly, he is escorted with dance to the Underworld, to Hades. It was for this re that Achilles, in his pain, wishing to honour Patroclos danced with the Myrmidons the pyrrhichios (pyrrhic) dance round the mortal remains of his friend and fellow warrior, while they were cremated on a pyre. Even though he knew that soon he would follow the same road. A perception of non-negotiable virtue.That which draws level with death through the power of life which dances.
Angeliki Komboholi – National Capodistrian University of Athens
istoria
Dance in Ancient Greece and Voluptuous Dances
The dances of ancient Greeks are estimated to exceed 200 and are distinguished into:
religious, martial, gymnastic, theatrical, acrobatic, violent, mournful, comic, symposiac, matrimonial and sensual, like whirling stróbīlos, leg-crossing schistas, the voice-intonated circle-dance choreia, or the licentious aposeisis, similar to belly-dance, which Aristophanes identifies with cordax, an ancient comic and obscene dance; in it, a woman, as she dances, shakes her breasts, waist and buttocks, i.e. “cordacizes” or misbehaves.
Demosthenes, in his second Olynthiac speech against Philip of Macedon in 349/349 BC, said that Philip is a hubrist, a mud-slinger. He gives in daily to debauchery and drunkenness, accompanied by obscene dancing and cordacisms. We learn from Theophrastus that cordax was a popular dance, danced in a state of brainless giddiness. In the oldest comedy, by Cratinus, ca. 450 BC, we find a description: Jumping movements are executed with touching legs, the body bent forward and the arms alternately stretched forward and upward, like swords. To these three movements, also mentioned in Aristophanic comedies, we must add huddling like a cockerel and leg-stretching forward, sideways or upwards, so that the buttocks and hips protrude ostentatiously and, with a jump, the heels touch the buttocks. These dances were regularly performed only by men, sometimes dressed in women’s clothes. When performed by women, the female dancers had male phalluses tied in the front of their body. The Greek dance cordax was also performed throughout the Roman era in the Hellenic world. In the dinner described in Petronius’ Satyricon, his hero Trimalchio claims that no one can dance cordax better than his wife, Fortunata. Cordax, one of the oldest Greek dances, was performed with a swaying of the waist to show off this crucial part of the body and to attract erotic attention. For this belly-dance we also have the evidence of Athinaios of Naucratis in his Deipnosophistae (3rd c. AD). In the book, a man by the name of Hippolochus narrates a story of Hellenistic times about the wedding of Caranus, an illustrious Macedonian lord in the Alexandrine period. He describes an instance of the feast, when women entered the hall and danced, swaying their waist and, gradually, their entire body. The story is well known that, in the “Galilee of the nations”, Salome danced in front of Herod, king of Galilee, son of Herod I the Great, son of Antipater from Macedonia. Salome supposedly danced the cordax, though not herself Greek, to please Herod and ultimately secure the beheading of John the Baptist. To note here that tsifteteli is a female, 2/4 rhythm, dance, with improvisations, widespread in Greece and the Balkans, as well as in the Orient Experts consider ancient Greece as its most likely origin and support the view that it evolved from cordax, the ancient Greek dance mentioned by Aristophanes. It is impressive that even in the period of the Byzantine era, although the attitude of both the Orthodox and the Catholic Churches was hostile to dancers, some of the ancient rhythms survived and were incorporated in daily manifestations, mainly of the popular strata. As a result, dances of this period remain cyclical (kyklioi) with elements directly referring to present traditional dancing practice.
Tsifteteli belongs to the genus of spasm, or convulsion, dances. Its typical feature, apart from spasms of the upper body and the wavelike movements of the torso, are the writhing, shaking, twisting movements of the abdominal area, bridging and wobbling of the entire body, and simultaneous reversions of arms and hands. It is mostly danced, and rightly so, by women, since breast shaking, hip convolution and body bending make sense only in relation to the excitement of males. It is noteworthy that it is a single person dance, which, however, can be danced simultaneously by several dancers, without taking the form of a cyclical dance. We can observe at this point that tsifteteli, because of its undoubted erotic character, cannot be included in tragedy dancing. Given its eroticism, as a mainly female dance, we have to wonder where in antiquity we can search for its origin. Both the worship of Dionysus and of Artemis offer a possible precedent, because it only these deities that were escorted by both men and women. Apart from Dionysus, only Artemis was called keladeine, or strong-voiced, or, in other words, mainomene (in ecstatic madness) and drunken goddess. Orgiastic and phallic dances were common in these two worship traditions, both deeply rooted in popular religion.
Isidoros Skliros, History researcher
