Did We Evolve To Dance?

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To Dance Is to Evolve The dance of the future will be a new movement, a consequence of the entire evolution which mankind has passed through.

— I S A D O R A D U N C A N, A RT O F T H E D A N C E • • • • •

Evolution . . . a wheeling motion in dance.

— A M E R I C A N H E R I TAG E D I CT I O N A RY

I need to walk. Alone. On the land. I can feel it.

For the past few days I have spent my movement time running along the road. Often before a busy day, striding along a hard, straight, narrow band of tar helps me organize my thoughts, calm my fears, and prepare for the challenges to come. I breathe hard. I sweat. I relax.

In between running days I have been dancing in my studio, which, at the moment, feels too small. While usually good for helping me focus on the small spans of sensation that strong movements require, today the walls and ceiling feel too confined, too confining. I need to get out. I need to uncurl myself in the infinite softness of meadows and trees and open skies. To unwind in air that pulses with the rhythms of living things. I need, most of all, to get out of my mind. It is scrambled with anxiety, always surrounding dance. I want to do more of it, but how? What am I supposed to be doing? There are issues to ponder while circling the pond.

I say good-bye to my family and head out from the house. I will meet them all in an hour at the wood’s edge where we are planning to harvest firewood from fallen trees. I start upward, past the withered, snow-strewn garden with its bent and broken stalks. I turn right, as I often do, and hug the top of the

To Dance Is to Evolve

pasture we made for our quarter horse, Marvin, which he refuses to inhabit.

He prefers the pasture that connects him with his sun-filled stall, his grain and water buckets, his view. He wants to feel at home. Me too.

As I prepare for my usual 180 degree turn to backtrack up the hill, an invisible pulse pulls me sideways. Come this way! Why?! I ignore the sensation and take a few steps. The pull persists. I give in and reverse my steps. Why not? I am on my way to a new place.

I cross our property line onto a neighbor’s hillside and begin ascending steeply. I notice that I am not noticing anything. It is amazing that I even was able to feel that pull.

I breathe down into the earth, surrendering to a fate woven through my genes. The ground crunches beneath my feet. A cold breeze sweeps my cheeks.

Bright sunshine closes my eyes. I am so wrapped in the stress of my own yearning. I need to get out. I breathe deeply into my chest and send the oxygen down my revving thighs and through my feet into the earth. As I mount, toe after toe imprints itself on the dirt.

Suddenly, a flare of feeling lights my sensory self. I see something. It is not much, but I am relieved to have an experience of being moved. Paths appear before me, stretching side to side across the hill. I cross one. Five feet later, I find another, rimming the headwall. Ten feet later, I cross another. I see scat and tracks—deer, fox, rabbit, mouse. And me. We are all walking this face of the earth, all picking through the briars, all looking for a way through.

Yet I am the only animal who is striding straight up the hill, perpendicular to the lines of elevation. Only I, the human, feel the need to force my way up against gravity, against the shape of the mountain, against the muscles in my legs, against the stress-mortared walls ringing my heart. I am blazing my own trail. I love it.

My chest softens. The pressures ease—the pressure of wanting to know, wanting to succeed, wanting to support my five beautiful children, wanting to nurture the art of my beloved spouse, wanting myself. I am increasingly vulnerable to being impressed by the world through which I walk. A dusting of grounded snow mirrors the swirling of clouds in the sky. Mostly brown, mostly blue, both flecked with white, below and above, with me in the middle. I swim in this space between. Moving through it, I am moved by it. And I know: there is no other way to be . . . here.

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To Dance Is to Evolve

A wisp of pure desire wafts through my awareness. I want to dance.

I smile and keep walking. I am.

Evolving Views In science and beyond, when mapping the material phenomena of nature, whether human, herbal, fungal, or otherwise, scholars consistently rely on theories of evolution variously understood to provide them with a conceptual paradigm. At least since Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, “evolution” has served as the best scientific explanation of why matter is what it is and why it has taken shape in the way it has. What is, according to evolutionary theories, has evolved. “It” has evolved into its current materiality through a process of natural selection in which those traits that allow it to survive and reproduce define it as what it is. For researchers in pursuit of knowledge, whether social, psychological, or scientific, the idea of evolution plots questions, organizes data, and frames the terms of subsequent debates. It ranks as the primary alternative in Western culture to the Jewish and Christian idea that God said “Let there be light” to create it all.

So too, theories of evolution are not only called upon to explain why matter is what it is, their use most often perpetuates and reinforces a materialist worldview. Typically understood, theories of evolution presume that matter is real and that matter is what evolves. Scientists and scholars plot the course of evolution in terms of entities—whether individual, species, colony, population, or gene—that resist change unless forced to change by the challenges and opportunities of their environments.1 Material units are the coin of evolutionary theory.2 Moreover, the idea that matter is that which resists change finds expression in the notion, central to evolutionary theories, that material entities survive in order to reproduce themselves. Discernible units of matter, in this view, are essentially and fundamentally selfish.3 They exist to make more of them.

They act, it follows, in ways that replicate their current material state—or at least, in ways that ensure the enduring legacy of their genetic matter. Either way, it is matter and its reproduction that must be explained. Even sexual selection, while encouraging diversity within the gene pool, is described as a strategy for

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To Dance Is to Evolve

finding mates that maximizes the chances that the species will remain more or less the same.

Further, once it is assumed that matter exists to reproduce itself, evolutionary models surmise that differences that emerge in the process of reproduction do so as a result of mistakes. These differences are random genetic mutations in the replicating process. Scientists assume that such errors are inevitable because the process is material. There is no intelligence involved to ensure correct outcomes.4 Evolution cannot plan forward. It cannot perceive need and respond. When a random error proves helpful to a given organism in exploiting available resources, then evolutionary theories predict that those organisms will do what they would ever always do and reproduce their new selves. In doing so, they will be more likely than others to survive.

Suspended as it is by this net of assumptions, much research into biological forms pivots on issues of reproductive fitness. Scientists identify a particular scale and shape of matter and ask: how does this limb or organ, tooth or nail, membrane or mitochondria, leaf shape or root system improve the ability of the material entity to which it belongs to reproduce itself? How does this material configuration aid an organism in finding food, mixing seed, escaping predators, and spawning and protecting able young?

In pursuit of these questions, researchers evoke the scientific method described in chapter 1. They isolate the material item under scrutiny from its context. They analyze its physiology, its uses, and its DNA. They identify a relationship between it and some prey, predator, or plant in the environment and look for evidence of a resulting reproductive advantage. They test their hypotheses by devising ways to restage that relationship, holding other variables constant, until results converge.

What do researchers find? They find knowledge that falls into patterns that their questions predict. Scientists debate whether a material node evolved (i.e., was found useful) for a precise purpose, or whether it was appropriated for that use after evolving for something else.5 They argue over whether a given unit of matter acts selfishly (as one would expect given the definition of matter) or altruistically (which usually resolves to selfishness on a larger scale, “the group�).6 They argue whether evolution occurred gradually (by accident) or in punctuated bursts (by accident).7 The terms and findings of these debates, as interesting, far-reaching, and even contradictory as they are, reinforce the beliefs that matter is real, that matter exists to reproduce itself, and 42

To Dance Is to Evolve

that matter evolves by random mutations in order to do so more effectively given the circumstances.

In buttressing these beliefs, theories of evolution also reinforce perspectives on bodily movement that accompany a matter-based paradigm. Movement is the function of a material form that an organism evolves via genetic mutations in order to reproduce itself. The speed spurt of a cheetah, the long leap of a gazelle, the wiggle of a worm, or the turning of a flower to the sun all represent physical characteristics that enhance the organism’s ability to find food and support its seed. This movement, in this view, is not itself agential. If the bear grows stronger or the bird more agile, the initiating cause is random changes in the material substance of its bodily self. It is these material features—able as they are to produce movement—that remain the focus and medium of evolution. As matter evolves, new movements become possible.

But, in the end, it is matter and not movement that evolves.

Given this implication for bodily movement, the idea that matter evolves, like the idea that matter is real, proves an obstacle when it comes to considering dance as a vital human art. Insofar as dance is bodily movement, it appears in an evolutionary framework as something that a material human body does. The questions scholars ask fall into categories noted above. Did humans evolve to dance, or is dancing a manifestation of material characteristics that evolved for other purposes? What are the physical characteristics that make humans able to dance? Does dancing enhance survival and reproductive fitness and, if so, how? Does it enable humans better to secure food, shelter, mates, or protection for their young? Did it emerge gradually or in a sudden leap?

In pursuing these questions about dancing, researchers tend to rely on material artifacts for evidence identifying the earliest form of human dancing: community dancing.8 Comparing these artifacts with the oldest extant traditions of dancing in existing hunter-gatherer populations, scholars in dance, religion, and anthropology look for measurable materialities to isolate, relate, and recreate.

Most often, scholars focus on the prolonged rhythmic repetition of bodily movements such as stepping and stamping or spinning, hopping, jumping, and clapping. Such dancing, many agree, induces chemical changes associated with pleasure that are so strong as to promote feelings of euphoria, alter human consciousness, and even induce trance.9 According to what contemporary machines can measure, dancing triggers responses in the parasympathetic nervous system, thereby releasing the restorative powers of a bodily self.10 43

To Dance Is to Evolve

These observations lead researchers to conclude that humans did evolve the capacity to move in time together—that is, to dance. The material effects it generates—and the pleasures they afford—are too pronounced to ignore. But the question remains why did humans evolve (as) this physiological capacity to be moved by movement?

An evolutionary framework, as commonly invoked, tilts responses toward group survival. Of the reasons offered, most are pegged to the communal function of feeling pleasure together with other humans.11 Sensations of joy felt at the same time, in the same space, are contagious. They amplify one another. This enhanced joy creates emotional bonds between members.

People come to rely on one another to help them access these pleasurable states and so come to appreciate one another as enabling their well-being. This sense of mutual need, it is thought, exerts a cohesive force in group activities, smoothing the way for cooperative ventures in distinctively human projects from hunting to cooking to caregiving to pair-bonding to ritual performance and intertribal warfare.12 A matter-based evolutionary approach to dancing, then, interprets dancing as a communal activity that promotes collective action among humans who, as material entities, would otherwise privilege their own interests above those of the group.13 Dancing, by expanding our sense of self rhythmically, viscerally, to include persons and forces larger than ourselves, provides us with an evolutionary advantage. This advantage, scholars conclude, must have been strong enough that it served as a node of natural selection. Humans evolved the genetic, neural, cognitive, physiological apparatus they needed in order to dance often and dance well.14 And in this engineering of social relations, dancing laid the genetic, neurological, cognitive ground for later developments in language, religion, ethics, law, and science.15 While this account of dance provides a robust defense of dancing when evoked in discussions of early human history, it is less able to defend the ongoing practice of dancing as human civilization takes hold. These answers for why humans dance affix that dancing to a function that can and eventually will be served by other cultural means that humans go on to create. Human beings evolve into material makers of material artifacts. They evolve the neural and muscular facility to manipulate symbols, invent languages, and devise implements of writing for recording those languages. As a result, scholars conclude, dance as communal adhesive is no longer needed to foster communal 44

To Dance Is to Evolve

bonding or cultivate social cohesion.16 We have more effective means and memes.17 From a matter-based, evolutionary perspective, dancing is at best instrumental to the process of becoming human. It is an activity that humans can do to facilitate social solidarity, but it is not something that they must do in order to be or become human. Dance can be left out, left behind, and, according to some, it should be. It should be left behind because it is an activity that humans do with their material bodies, and, as the story continues, humans distinguish themselves from the plants and animals of nature by evolving and exercising intelligent, self-conscious minds.18 When we begin to appreciate that movement is what matters, however, an idea emerges with the potential to reinterpret existing theories of communal dancing in such a way that we can appreciate the ongoing value of dance as vital art here and now. If we privilege bodily movement rather than matter as the currency of evolution, if we insist upon seeing any and all bodily forms as potentials for movement making, then we can begin to perceive dancing, then and now, as a practice in which humans exercise a distinctive human potential to participate in the ongoing evolution of the universe in human-enabling ways.

Here the task of this chapter comes into view. By exploring the idea that movement (and not matter) evolves, this chapter clears the ground for envisioning dance not just as an activity that human beings evolved to do but as the bodily capacity whose potential for creating life the human species exists to maximize.

Movement That Evolves I break through the hedgerow into the hay fields. The hill’s pitch tips horizontal here. My stride eases. I turn my left side to the open air and walk the field’s perimeter. Someone else walked here. Something else. This time I follow the path. Its path. Its moves were wise ones, flanking the hedgerow, hanging out in shadows, while keeping one eye on the wide sideways space.

I slip into a corner of the field and veer to the left, skirting the briars that guard the edge. My thoughts drift back in time. How many humans have walked as I am doing now—feet padding on matted earth? Yes, this ground 45

To Dance Is to Evolve

has been mowed and its grasses gathered; its rocks dug and stacked into dividing walls. But still, these forms of frond, bush, and tree would have been familiar to the earliest humans.

It occurs to me. We all evolved together, in one ungainly mass of mutually enabling movements. The movements I make in sensing evolved in collusion with the movements of other bodily selves who were capable of being sensed. I can see this tree and hear this bird and feel this earth because the movement patterns made by my senses are tuned to theirs. The movement my senses are is keyed to the scope and scale of movement patterns that serve as food, that threaten danger, that block my way, or that offer pliable substances for my hands to work. Lung and air, hand and branch, foot and field all evolved together.

The flash of experience yields a thought both severe and comforting: my sensory self needs the infinite dimensions and depth of the natural world in order to exercise and develop its range of movement potential. My senses need these particular patterns of stimuli in order to unfold, even as this pulsing web needs my movements in order to be what it is in relation to me.19 I don’t want to go anywhere else. The thought ignites my bodily self. I feel its bolt as a clearing, broad as the field along which I walk. In this moment I know: I want to live a life that enables me to be here, on this gorgeous piece of ground, free to live with it, be moved by it, and express it in the thoughts it enables. I like to walk like this, to feel and think like this—with a swelling sense of earth within.20 I am at home. I do not want to leave. I want to be free to stay here. To dance here. To become human here.

I take one last look at the field and duck through the hedgerow into a favorite patch of forest. The trees welcome me. I don’t know their names. My son Jordan does. Although he tells me, I can’t seem to remember. I can’t relate to them as oak, hickory, maple, and elm. To me they are friends. Though far taller than I, they meet my eyes as slender and round. I can throw my arms around each one.

Walking past their stillness, I feel the shapes of their movement—energy flowing down into the earth, up toward the sun, out along the branches, swirling through twigs, emptying into a few dying leaves, and returning again.

These trees are alive. They are animate columns of life, teaching me how to move as they do. How to stand as an open conduit between earth and sky; 46

To Dance Is to Evolve

how to make matter from the movements of dirt, air, water, and light. I linger with the kinetic image of living trees as it forms in me. Earth within.

Do other animals have similar experiences of awe? I wonder. Do they see a tree as a symbol and metaphor of themselves? Do they feel an impulse to hug it? Do they learn about themselves by feasting their eyes on its shape? Do other animals see in themselves a pattern of tree-movement that gives them permission to be that pattern? Do they need permission to be?

••••• The notion that matter evolves, just like the idea that matter is real (chapter 1), carries within it the seeds of its own overcoming. It too harbors a contradiction that cannot be resolved within the terms of a materialist paradigm: matter evolves to reproduce itself. Herein lies the contradiction. The motivation that propels matter to change is a desire to stay the same—to achieve a stable state that can be re-produced. As noted, in order to resolve this contradiction, scientists propose a theory of random genetic mutations. A given individual (or species) reproduces itself until some error in its process of replication proves beneficial to the twin goals of survival and reproduction.

Yet this explanation does not explain how genetic mutations can be so welladapted to the challenges of the environment, nor how they erupt with such diversity and spread so quickly. It does not explain why, of all possible mutations, these ones emerged.21 Nor does it explain (as seen in chapter 1) how something as complicated and seemingly immaterial as human consciousness could emerge out of a merely material process.

The nascent field of epigenetics attempts to reduce the random element in evolutionary theory by studying the effects of the environment on the ability of genes to express themselves. While still holding that genes are matter, that matter exists, and that matter evolves, scientists in this line of inquiry go far in admitting that genetic development is context sensitive. Genes are not the equivalent of a blueprint that makes use of whatever resources are present.

Genes have options. Genes “decide” to unfold one way or another based on available, ingested food; environmental factors, and even its organism’s traumatic experiences. A recent study revealed that as much as 98 percent of our genetic matter—so-called junk DNA, which scientists previously assumed had no purpose—actually consists of switches capable of turning genes on or off in response to a yet uncharted range of stimuli.22 47