And if you don’t really know how to dance the hora, you will nevertheless be compelled to join hands with others, stumble around in a circle, give little kicks and pretend to enjoy yourself, all the while wondering if there’s a word in Yiddish that means “she who stares pathetically at the feet of others because she is still trying to figure out how to dance the hora. This month, in a freewheeling symposium at the University of Michigan on the evolutionary value of art and why we humans spend so much time at it, a number of the presenters supplemented their standard PowerPoint presentations with hands-on activities. In the main presentation at the conference, Ellen Dissanayake, an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Washington , Seattle, offered her sweeping thesis of the evolution of art, nimbly blending familiar themes with the radically new. But among traditional cultures and throughout most of human history, she said, art has also been a profoundly communal affair, of harvest dances, religious pageants, quilting bees, the passionate town rivalries that gave us the spires of Chartres, Reims and Amiens. Art, she and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. She suggests that many of the basic phonemes of art, the stylistic conventions and tonal patterns, the mental clay, staples and pauses with which even the loftiest creative works are constructed, can be traced back to the most primal of collusions the intimate interplay between mother and child. read more

Tags: art, hora, dissanayake, ms, dance, evolutionary