Why don't all animals dance? Perhaps they do.
When it comes to the study of Dance in Living Systems (see footnote
Video evidence suggests that Dance in Humans goes back to, at the very least, the 1920s. A prime example is the Charleston
As we broaden the search to different dances, a pattern starts to emerge. There are simple dance moves that don’t require a song, or even a beat, such as Flossing. There are dances that go with specific beats and music styles, eg Rhumba and Waltz. There are more interpretive dances as seen in Ballet, where finding the beat and rhythm requires a more abstract understanding of both the music and story being told. Finally, we have dances that are only performed to specific songs. The Macarena and The Chicken Dance are such examples, with the most egregious being the Cha Cha Slide by DJ Casper
"Right foot two stomps, Left foot two stomps, Slide to the left, Slide to the right"
Some of the movements described above stretch the notion of dance. Take flossing for example
So what makes a movement dance? Is any reptitive motion dance? If so, many animals would be dancers, and our work here would be complete. One can easily imagine training an animal to perform a repetitive motion. So animals can dance at the level of Flossing. One can also imagine training an animal to dance a specific routine, to a specific song, with specific instructions being given to them as the song progresses. So animals can dance at the Cha Cha Slide level. Therefore, for an animal to truly dance, it must be able to move its body in the form of ‘Waltz’ to music in the form of ‘Waltz’. Likewise it must be able to must be able to move its body in the form of ‘Rhumba’ to music in the form of ‘Rhumba’.
So why then, do animals not dance? Are animals too dumb to infer a beat? If dogs can understand emotional expressions in a human face
It may be that a dog’s sense of smell is a much greater influence on their sense of the world, then say sight or even hearing. Could it be then, that dogs do not dance because they are not provided with rhythmic smells that would constitute as olfactory music for them?
What forms of ‘music’ move animals? Would a gerbil really Waltz or Rhumba? How tied are we to the notions of the human experience that we neglect the experience of our fellow critters. We as humans interpret patterns of waves in the air, call it music, then our mind and body convert those patterns to movement - patterns that we understand on a kinesiologically human level.
Imagine a deaf man dancing to the music of sight. Visual colors and shapes that inspire his body to motion. Imagine an old woman, unable to stand, dancing with her eyes (or in her mind), to the sound of an old record. Now, is it such a stretch to imagine a dog, performing pattered motion (perhaps foreign to our understanding - yet fundamentally so relatable), to the ‘music of the nostrils’?
I often wonder, why do we humans dance to sound and not sight? It would seem that our vision takes up more brain space than hearing, so shouldn’t that move us the most? Indeed, people do dance visually. We can copy the motion of others, and dance just like they do, without a ‘sound in sight’. But again that doesn’t capture ‘real dance’ to ‘real music’. I would suggest that our emotional life is tied to sound more than sight. It is the voice of our mothers, of the people who raised us as babies, that instructs our pains and pleasures as we grow. So sound has a deep connection to what it is to be human.
An argument could be made that at some abstract level all patterned, repetitive motion can be considered dance, and that, by looking at long time scales, we can find dance all around us. But a dance must have a beginning and an end. Otherwise, we could photograph a flower, who opens and closes each day to the patterned music of the sun. Watching this in fast forward, across weeks, we would begin to see a dance emerge. I suppose this dance does have a beginning and end, from our perspective on the outside. The flower, however, would only know its life as a servant to the music of the stars.