Dance

Dance is the rhythmic movement of the body, usually performed to music within a defined space, undertaken to express an idea or emotion, release energy or delight in movement itself. Its true origin is lost in prehistory, but cave paintings in Spain and France depicting groups of figures in dancelike formations have led scholars to infer that religious rite and sympathetic magic were central motivations among early peoples. Because dance leaves no physical trace comparable to a painted wall or carved stone, everything known about its earliest forms is inferred rather than directly observed. Across history dance has served religious, military and social functions before gradually developing into codified theatrical forms. In the West this produced two dominant modern strands: ballet, a formal theatrical tradition rooted in European court dance dominant since the seventeenth century, and modern dance, which emerged in the United States and Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a deliberate protest against ballet's formalism, most influentially in the contraction-and-release technique developed by Martha Graham in early twentieth century America.