Liturgical Dance

Liturgical Dance

“Liturgical dance is dance or gesture used within worship for the glory of God. It is intended to add depth and dimension to the spoken or sung text and/or music within the worship service by use of visual display, as enhancement for the words as they come to life through movement and drama. Liturgical dance may also be performed in silence without the use of words or music. Many of the movements choreographed are literal and easily understood by those witnessing while the dancers create a tapestry of movement for the viewer much like an externalized prayer. Sacred dance has been a continued presence in many faith practices since the beginning of time and has a long, rich history, especially in the Christian faith. Within the Judeo-Christian scriptures, so much of the history of the Hebrew people is threaded time after time with accounts of dances of the sacred, both communal and solo, in prayer or in celebration.”

Earlier tendencies to focus on myth, due its linguistic medium and consequent assumed meaningfulness, to the relative neglect of certain nonverbal forms of ritual are now in the first stages of reversal. More attention is now being given to such media as dance. However, these studies have to contend with a basic defect of ethnographic method: the lack of any system of notation of bodily movement that is both accurate and widely used. This parallels the problem of recording and interpreting the special modes of pronunciation or chanting of ritual language. Although tape recordings can capture such forms in the raw, there is still a significant difficulty in the recognition and interpretation of their distinctive features from analytic study of notated transcripts.

Certain stylistic features, such as imitation, appear to transcend the divide between the verbal and nonverbal modes of ritual. Aristotle noted that the modes of imitation (mimesis) are different in different arts: in music, rhythm and harmony would be the modes employed (Poetics 1.1), whereas in painting, color and line would presumably be the relevant modes. The concept of mimesis itself has been traced to the ritual dances that formed the basis of Greek tragedy (Koller, 1954), which suggests that the original forms of imitation were not verbal at all, but gestural. The use of imitation in the nonverbal dimensions of ritual was documented already in Frazer's account of sympathetic magic. As previously described, ritual language often uses poetic imitation in a similar way. The Hindu Tantric womb sign (yonimudra), which iconically depicts the embrace of the womb, is a gestural equivalent and substitute for the verbal enveloping of the mantra with magic syllables. Both types of icon diagram basic processes of creation, including sexual intercourse. In such cases, verbal and nonverbal forms of ritual behavior may carry an identical meaning and pragmatic function. The fact that certain semiotic patterns transcend the divide between language and movement reinforces the conclusion that movement shares with language a cultural and cognitive basis.

Ritual frequently coordinates verbal and nonverbal behaviors through superimposition, simultaneity, ...