Typologies are tools to help us understand the range of observed phenomena. Many typological categories are useful in dance research, contrasting various features in the data. Based on the identity of the recipient of the danced message, four types of dance can be identified: reflexive, participatory, sacred, and presentational. The conceptual axis between participatory and presentational dance is proposed as potentially significant for ethnochoreologists. Differences in the intended recipient of the communicated message affect the other components of the dance event, including the movement “text.”

At least in our example of two Ukrainian dances, participatory dances carry their communicative message over short distances, and utilize microscopic movement elements for this purpose. The message in presentational dances must be carried over a greater span, and macroscopic movement units tend to carry this communicative value. In both types of dance, the movement content is most complex at the structural levels which are most used in communication. Conversely, participatory dances are often simple on the macroscopic level, while presentational dances tend to have uncomplicated microscopic content.

The participatory-presentational axis can clarify important differences in activities often lumped together under the problematic category of “folk” dance. These conceptual categories may be of use for anyone studying dance in its cultural context.

”Dance, dear body, do not think,” the message attributed to the serpent in Paul Valéry's poem “La jeune parque,” lends biblical connotations to the duality between body and mind, between dance and philosophy. A similar duality between movement and thought is found in Valéry's “L'âme et la danse” (1921), a mock Platonic dialogue in which three Greek philosophers respond to a group of dancers performing in front of them. In “L'âme et la danse” the action unfolds between the eminent philosophical figures of Socrates, Eryximachus and Phaedrus, and Athikte, a young woman dancer. More than a dialogue; it is a drama through which philosophy confronts dance, in which the philosophers, who are men, confront the dancers, who are women, and across the course of which the dancers are voiceless.

In this essay, I explore a confrontation between philosophy and dance through the tension between the roles Valéry accords to men and women in philosophical discourse. Women dance, men think. Freeing the dancer from the fetters of philosophical thought is akin to liberating women from the need to bother themselves with intellectual matters. Athikte, as the voice of dance, introduces an entirely different range of philosophical issues from those which, on the surface, animate the dialogue. But, above all, Athikte illustrates how an unproductive tension between philosophy and dance can be intensified through the uncritical preservation of gendered roles within philosophical discourse.

I recently had the opportunity to reread Allegra Fuller Snyder's “The Dance Symbol” (1974), in which she claimed a central role for dance in non-literate cultures:

Snyder explained that dance is able to occupy this all-inclusive, central role in maintaining and transmitting knowledge within such cultures because it communicates through what she calls the “dance symbol”. The dance symbol is the outer and observable aspects of the dancer (movement, costume, and paraphernalia) which are, in turn, both derived from and stand in relation to and for a culturally-specific environment, subsistence pattern, and mythic complex.