Shut up and Dance!

Who doesn't love music? Everyone, extrovert or introvert, from Europe to the Amazon rain forest, likes music, and why wouldn't we? Music can inspire us, excite us, effect our emotions and importantly, make us dance! But what is dancing? And why have cultures that all developed separately around the world all developed both music and dance? Read on a bit and I'll tell you why.

So if we're asking why do we dance, we pretty obviously need to know why we make music? As music and dance go hand in hand and with music being the world's leading cause of dance, it's a pretty integral factor.

Music is a funny thing, if you think about it, it is a bunch of pretty unusual sounds, all in the same key (the soundwaves are oscillating harmonically), in set predictable patterns, with the optional addition of one or more humans singing along to words that convey a message when listened to.

Maybe a better way to understand the purpose of music is to understand where it came from. Nowadays music seems to be all about love and largely promiscuity, with a nice sprinkling of depression and general emotional turmoil mixed in for some variety. But at heart, it is still telling a story, and as we go backwards in time this trend becomes stronger and stronger. Even if we look back to the 60s and 50s we see an ever increasing amount of sings following a lyrical pattern with more story than nowadays and where the repeated section (or chorus) is more used for conveying one particular part of the story or as emphasis for effect in a similar manner to writers.

Rewind even further to the dark ages and nearly all of the songs were of great deeds or kings and nights and notable battles of the time, probably one of the more interesting things for people of those times and in an extremely similar manner to the songs in Game of Thrones (other than the awesome theme song) like "The rains of Castamere" which depicts a small war an annihilation of a lesser house.

At this point it is blindingly obvious that music did not evolve as a few humans passed the time by making weird noises, but as people telling stories, and people adding emphasis to certain parts, and making the stories more exciting with sounds until eventually, much like how we evolved from our bacterial buddies, music evolved to the incredible phenomena that it is today, a sort of inevitable branch of the art of language developed by our ancient ancestors.

And NOW we can have a bit of a clue as to what dancing really is, because much like how music has aspects of its original purpose - storytelling, still around today, so does dancing. Lets give it a thought, what do we do when we dance? We move right? But for a lot of songs those movements aren't random, but particular movements associated with that song (Notable mentions are "Twist and Shout", "Gangam Style", "Cha Cha Slide" and the last song in dirty dancing with the really cool dance to it.) Remind you of anything? Dancing may very well be the result of reenactments of stories, and visual aids to storytellers, evolving over time in a similar manner to music.

And as if we needed any more evidence we need look no further than South Africa, a land rich in culture, where many ancient tribes of people still thrive to this day, and The Zulu and the Ndebele tell stories of their history of war victories through tribal dances. 

So there we have it, dancing has evolved from an aid to storytelling, similar to pantomime, to the eventual, wonderful thing that it is today. Our world today is generally extremely divided but there are some things we cannot escape, our basic human needs, our desire to be around other people, and our love of both music and dance. So in summary, we need to remember the seeds that our ancestors planted tens of thousands of years ago and recall our similarities instead of our differences as our world becomes divided by class, religion and frankly unjustifiable wars. Also, SHUT UP AND DANCE.


See you all again soon and once more, thank you so much for reading :)