What is dance?

Module 1: Learning to move with time itself

Figure 1: Dance lived in the body—un-staged, sensory, and communal.

If someone asked you, "What is dance?", you might picture someone performing Bharatanatyam, an Intertribal Powwow dancer, a Flamenco artist, or someone getting down to the radio in their kitchen. This image in your head might be something you recalled happening right in front of you in a noisy space, or far away on a stage in silence. Or maybe you can smell the sweat and taste the drink you had dancing at the last wedding you attended. Or perhaps it was an artist's representation, such as Degas's famous paintings of ballerinas.

Or maybe you didn't see a picture as much as feel a sensation—a sense of, "I don't do that" or "I wish I could." Alternatively, you remember when you used to, but no longer do since an injury some years ago.

So, when I ask you what dance is, you probably answered the question first with your senses before any words came to mind. If you thought about it long enough, words most likely came, but they emerged from the experience of encountering the idea of movement. These names and phrases remained tethered to the moving, sensing, digesting, and inventing of a human body in space.

Dance is the process of being human in motion. To study dance is to examine what it means to be us—not just in the world around us, but also what we move within through our thoughts, emotions, and intentions. In its most profound, transcendent sense, dance is how we move with attention itself through time. Yes, I'm saying even your soul is dancing inside you right now.

In the Gypsy Fires Dance Library, we will explore many traditions that have spent thousands of years understanding how dance works through trial and error. From your molecules to your limbs to your destiny, this is a place for you to remember how to move, observe the dance of your own life, and discover your intention for how you will move down the road.

Gypsy Fires is an open space to explore the motion of being human. Equally important, it is open time for you to release thoughts and "listen to your body," as they say. But this is active, and it's unexpected. We're not here to evaluate or assess movement, just to see it for what it is—and dance the whole time. To access dance in its broadest sense, I call it timedancing: the simple awareness of what you carry into the vastness of who you are and how you move.

Welcome to the dance.

Can we call anything that moves "dance"—including sitting on a toilet? Perhaps. But the final lesson here is that it is for you to decide for yourself what dance is; it belongs to no one else. You can agree with others on definitions, but it remains your choice.

To better understand who decides what dance is and is not—or more broadly, who dictates what should and shouldn't move and how—we must define something else.

Next Lesson: What is Choreography? →

In the Library: Context & Further Reading

• Susan Leigh Foster — Knowing as Moving: Perception, Memory, and Place
  Book · A decolonial reimagining of knowledge as bodily motion, replacing the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" with "I move, and therefore I know."
• Brenda Dixon Gottschild — Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance
  Book · An essential text examining how European dance institutions systematically co-opted and erased non-Western movement traditions.
• Bharatanatyam & The Natya Shastra (India)
  Video Archive · Alarmel Valli Profile & Performance — A demonstration showing how classical Indian dance turns rigid geometry into an embodied, cosmic language.
• The Sema of the Mevlevi Order (Sufi Whirling)
  UNESCO Archive · The Mevlevi Sema Ceremony — Official footage of the Sufi whirling ritual in Konya, demonstrating repetitive turning as an embodied meditation through time.
• Malick Sidibé — Danseur Méringué (Merengue Dancer) (1964/2008)
  Visual Art / Museum Archive · Pérez Art Museum Miami (Object 2014.116) — Sidibé's iconic gelatin silver print capturing post-independence Malian youth culture in un-policed, celebratory motion.