Children and Dance

Abstract

Evolution shows that human development has been influenced by movement, including dance. Why? Attention to motion is critical for survival to cope with eating or being eaten, social bonding, and shaping and sharpening both body and brain. Dance is a complex physical, multisensory, emotional, and cognitive form of communicative motion with widely distributed processing in the internally differentiated brain. These facts contradict earlier views of dance as merely physical and emotional. Dance is a language, composed of purposeful, intentionally rhythmical, and culturally influenced sequences of nonverbal body movements and stillness in time and space, and with effort performed with notions of aesthetic value and competency. A method of conveying complex concepts and ideas with or without recourse to sound, dance is more often like symbolic poetry than prose. Dance occurs in formal and informal settings. The body sounding off with cognition, affect, continuity, and change in dance may reflect or influence society. Amazingly, researchers from at least twenty-two disciplines worldwide have conducted research on dance and the child, including anthropology, Asian studies, computer science, dance, education, endocrinology, occupational therapy, neuroscience, humanities, mechanical engineering, medicine, movement science, nursing, physical education, pediatric oncology, psychiatry, psychology, public health, sport and human performance, theater, urban studies and planning, and therapy. The discipline of dance is relatively new compared to that of other art forms. In the United States, Gertrude Colby was employed to teach dance pedagogy courses to aspiring and experienced educators at Teachers College as early as 1912. Her approach was a creative process, “natural dancing.” The first university dance major was in the Women’s Physical Education Department at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1926. Today there are university dance departments offering PhDs. Movement is the defining characteristic of life, and a healthy child continually develops dance movement skills. They learn to imitate. Most people of the world learn to dance in family and community settings. There are also schools, site-based dances, and flash mobs (groups of people assemble suddenly in a public place to dance for a short time and then disperse). The process of dance education for child development is as important as the outcome. Today we have an amateur visual/auditory history of dance created by children and adolescence on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. Sections in this article are Dance Theory/Action, Early Childhood, Learning Dance and Other Subjects, Teaching Approaches, Dance and Health, Spirituality, and Dance, Reality Television, and Social Media.