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127 23 The Emergence of Dance Hands take leave of the trunk and reach out for things; they clench and grip, push and pull. Tools are solid things detached from the environment and handled. Hands make themselves instruments for taking hold and taking back. Hands poke, probe, punch, strike. Hands drop and toss; arms heave and hurl. They make things projectiles and are themselves ballistic. The feet orient the axes of the torso, they drive the outstretched hands. They understand the predator instincts of the hands. The hand is the earliest container. A clay bowl is the cupped hand freed from the hand. What the hand has freed from the hand can be passed to another hand. Thus ritual begins.1 Hands run over contours and hollows, stroke fur and fungus, rub at gum and stroke gooseflesh, spray water and send waves into tubs and lakes. They uncover, discover, behold. They wonder, ponder, and weigh. They are sense organs. The feet raise, the legs bend. They understand the tenderness of the hands circumnavigating the shapes and stroking the pulp of things. The feet feel rocks and sand and other feet. The toes, the ankles, the knees, the thighs are organs to feel spaces. Rhythms begin in them and send them on along trails and on open roads. Feet that keep moving find spaces free of paths or destinations. They stand on terra firma, rise into the sky, glide in the water. The feet understand the dangers—the bruises, the lacerations, the burns that the hands, the torso, the tongue may feel. They understand decline and fall, death and decomposition. Hands apprehend and are apprehensive. They touch the solid in order to detect the void. A hand extends to the starving child in a refugee camp, a hand opens tenderly about the fledgling bird fallen from the nest in the storm. The hand stroking the dying one communicates no information and brings no relief and extends no hope, is there only to accompany someone in her or his dying, to suffer and to die with him or her. *** 128 V I O L E N C E A N D S P L E N D O R Exploratory and teleological movements arise out of the periodic and rhythmic movements of all animal life. Fish in the sea, butterflies and antelope in the savannah, birds in the sky dance. Dance frees the hands from exploratory and efficient movements, the legs from hunting and fleeing. A dance moves in a space emptied of the order of things and of things. The bodies are not afloat in emptiness but move in a space full of light and darkness and warmth and, drawing upon the bottomless repose of the ground, stand, bend, roll, and lie, endlessly everywhere mobile. The abdomen has no muscles to do anything but hold itself together . It pulses with restless blood, milk, biles, sludges. The bared abdomen does not conceal the heart but becomes heart throughout. Hands move without results or ends in view. They rise, turn back upon themselves, fold, spiral. Movements draw designs as they move into the emptiness. The empty space dilates and contracts, throbs and engulfs . One hand gyrates around the other, around the hands of another. Hands tease, ignite eddies of pleasure and torment in other hands, in flanks, bellies, breasts, and lips. The arms turn, drift, float upward. The legs extend the warmth, the pulse, the insistence of the heart. Dance disengages the bodies from tools, weapons, and paths to move them in the space free of taboos where dance sacred and demonic animals. In the beginning when humans were hunters and gatherers, they lived dispersed in families and small bands. Like any other species, they had evolved in ecosystems that sustained and nourished them. Paleoanthropologist Marshall Sahlins calculated that in the Stone Age humans spent no more than three or four hours a day in work—foraging, hunting, preparing food, making shelters.2 In their long leisure hours, they, as in hunter-gatherer societies today, took siestas, played practical jokes, argued , took dips in the river, engaged in every kind of sexual play. They also sang and drummed and danced. Song and dance are not intentional acts but rhythmic vocalizations and movements that go on by themselves, generating refrains and variations, picked up from one another, passed on to one another. Disparities among individuals and hostile initiatives dissolve, initiatives dissolve. People from the adjacent families, and then from other groups that passed, assembled...

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