Dance and Drill

Engaging in community dance and/or military drill by moving rhythmically together for long periods of time is a very effective way of arousing excited, shared, and friendly feelings among the participants. This effect is reinforced by music and voicing, all the way from band music and choral singing to drill sergeants' shouts of “Hut, Hip, Hip, Four.” Somehow moving muscles together in time, with voices backing up the rhythmic beat, makes people feel good, wipes out old grudges, and smoothes over personal rivalries. Even when the immediate excitement subsides, such exercises leave a residue of fellow-feeling and readiness to cooperate. This had important effects in times past and still exhibits itself in politics, religion, and innumerable social settings where people dance or march together.

Exactly how shared feelings are aroused when we dance or march is not accurately known. Hormones and the sympathetic nervous system are surely involved; so are parts of the brain. Suffice it to say that such behavior and their results are both unique to and universal among human beings. Only humans engage in community dancing and making music; and all known human societies do both. Only a few, however, harnessed this human response to keeping together in time for military purposes, though those that did so profited from the [Page 381]superior discipline and morale of soldiers who drilled regularly and for long periods of time.

When rhythmic dancing and music-making first arose among humankind is unknown, but it must have been very early. The advantage of greater cooperation arising from dancing together on festival occasions must have been enormous, since such dancing prevailed universally among bands of hunters and gatherers and peasant villagers when observers first began to take notice and write about it. Recent observations of our closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees of Africa, suggests why this was so. In 1970, the band Jane Goodall and her helpers were studying split in two rival parts, and in the next two years the smaller group of seceding males were hunted down and killed by their rivals, who thus regained their whole territory and the females who had seceded. Superior numbers (and perhaps stronger cohesion) among the core members of the old band thus prevailed. Obviously, if dancing together allowed our ancestors to overcome the sort of individual frictions that split the chimpanzee band apart in 1970, it is easy to imagine how larger numbers of more cooperative humans would prevail against neighbors who had not yet learned to dance—thus making that form of behavior universal within a few generations.

Thereafter different human groups elaborated the possibilities of rhythmic movement together in innumerable different ways. Dancing designed to consult and/or please the spirits or gods could and did become professionalized. From this, organized priesthoods and formal religions eventually emerged. Later on, in urban settings, expert exhibitions of dancing (and music) became entertainment for merely human audiences. But participatory dancing by believers remained a growing point for religions, as is clear from Biblical references to how Saul and David danced before the Lord and founded the Hebrew kingdom, largely on the strength of enthusiastic bands of young men who danced with them.

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