The Importance of Dance

Ever since I started dancing when I was six year old, I was expose to many cultural dances that a world could offer. Many of the cultural dances that I’ve experience or heard are salsa, tango, modern dance, tap dance, and West African dance. Every cultural dance represents each ethnic culture and have their own stories told within the dances. Dance is truly an important ability because it introduces you to cultural appreciation and it does this in a healthy way.

Learning to dance simply starts after a person learns to walk as a tiny tot so almost everyone have the ability to dance in any circumstances. The first step to learning to dance is to choose an interesting cultural dance and find a person that mastered the dance to teach the steps. The next step is learning to coordinate the steps according to the beat of the music. Hand motions, spinning, and twirling are part of the dance movements besides from the steps.

There are varieties kinds of cultural dances that people able learn from tango to West Africa dance. According to W.G. Raffé’s Dictionary of Dance, most of cultural dances are considered ritual or court ceremonial from their native countries. To name the few definition of different cultural dances, Chinese dance is an example of ritual dance while definition of jazz dance is considered “Islamic perform as ritual prayers until later slavery took it to New Orleans where black slaves displaced by Christian hymns.”

People learning certain cultural dances will eventually learned to appreciate the culture that the dance originated. People will realized that each cultural dance has its own meanings and stories such as Hawaiian Dance and West African. Hawaiian dance is one of the examples of what I called “story telling” dance because during my dance class in my high school years, we were taught a day worth of lessons on Hawaiian dance and realized that most of the movement relates to Mother Nature. My high school dance teacher’s sister from Hawaii was invited to show us that when one hand moves in a wavy motion in the air while moving hip from side to side meaning being in the ocean. Another movement from a day of Hawaiian dance was having one arm act like picking something out from the tree while the other hand holds straight up in front means picking fruits out of a tree.

Dancing can also be perceived as another kind of exercise or sport activities to improve healthier lifestyle. According to American Heritage Dictionary, exercise means “to put into play” so dancing is just as similar as exercise from a health perspective. I am considered dancing as such as West African dance just like an exercise, a way to lose weight and gain strength. For example, West African dance looks similar to aerobic class but West African dance requires no plastic steps or no exercise on the floor and each dance step represent its own meanings; otherwise, it look like another kind of aerobic exercises.

Dancing helps develop much healthier bodies and mind but most of all the cultural appreciation of the cultural dancing. Dancing can be easy to learn for certain people like me but others may find it hard to pick up the dance steps. Learning to dance is just the first step to great health benefits and cultural appreciation. Dancing should always be seen as health regimes to losing weight, gain strength, and decrease stress just like many other exercises and recreational activities. Other than health benefits, people will eventually learned a great deal of cultural appreciation because ritual dances represents each culture by sharing the dancing techniques to many people who are unfamiliar with.