Dance features in a lot of fairy-tale type stories, like Beauty and the Beast, and Cinderella, etc. Che mentioned the book Aria of the Sea, by Dia Calhoun, which is about a ballet school. There was a story in Asimov's where children with perfect foot turnout were cloned so they could be great ballet dancers. (It was told from the point of view of a police dog protecting an aging ballerina).
Cliff mentioned "The Funeral March of the Marionettes" by Adam-Troy Castro, in which aliens called marionettes or spiders have a yearly dance in which 100,000 of them dance to the death. The story features ambassadors watching the dance and discovering a human dancing in the group. Most of the choreography is implied.
Choreography is an interesting issue, because you want enough of it to give a feel of the dance, but lengthy descriptions of choreography will feel very clunky. It's actually similar to action scenes of other kinds, like fight scenes and sex scenes. You need to figure out why it would be important to include choreographic details, and connect the significance of those details to character development and the overall dynamic of the scene.
Kate talked about how dance is a language with meaning, and communicates something. When we describe in narrative, we often focus on what is being conveyed rather than how many millimeters an eyebrow was raised. You can describe the dance physically, as well as describing what it means.
We have many reasons for dancing, including just-for-fun, for social reasons, and for ritual reasons. Father-daughter dances at a wedding, or group dances like the hora at weddings, have specific kinds of significance beyond the choreography of the dance.
You can dance for yourself, for a specific other partner, for the purpose of cementing community (as with weddings, funerals, mass courtship, etc.), for performance, etc.
Many dances have a codified repertoire of motions. Noh dance, hula, and ballet are examples of these.
Culturally embedded movements can be exoticized. Be aware that such movements occur across all cultures. We don't want to exaggerate Otherness unless it is an explicitly recognized facet of the point of view character.
What is the performer feeling? What is the audience feeling?
Does describing the movements distance you from the narrative? It depends on which point of view you are describing from.
You can describe the music, the tempo, the legs, arms, eyes, face, fingers, etc.
Kat mentioned Lois Bujold's mirror dance. What is described? One character can be teaching the other.
In The Sound of music, there is a scene where Maria dances a traditional Austrian dance with the Captain, and it represents how their relationship is changing.
In Little Women, there is a ball. The focus in this context is not on choreography but on the social meanings being conveyed. Slippers, how tired people are, who is asking whom, etc.
Stardance includes choreography of a zero-g dance.
As the writer, we get to decide what is important to convey about the dances in our stories.
Clothing for dances can vary a lot, particularly between practice and performance.
Some children learn to dance by standing on their parents' feet (either facing them or facing outward, depending on the dance). Some learn by watching. Some children can learn at a surprisingly early age.
Think about where people get taught to dance. Do you go to a dance school? Do you simply attend public functions and get taught by people there? Do you mirror someone's movements? Do you watch as a bystander? Do you stand behind the dancer you're imitating?
There is specialized language associated with different forms of dance, and depending on the dance's origins, this language can be imported from another language. Ballet, for example, has its roots in France, and the words we use to describe its moves are in French even though they have been imported/converted into English.
If you are writing a historically based story, it's really valuable to do research on the kinds of dance used at the time, its origins, its moves, and the language used to describe it. If you try to use an anthropological voice to describe it, you'll typically be using an outsider viewpoint.
Some dances are not permitted to outsiders. There are limits to how much of this kind of dance can be witnessed and described. This applies to some extent to geisha and also to Native American and other traditions across the world. In the story "Time Considered as Helix of Semiprecious Stones" by Samuel Delany, the singers' activity is not allowed to be described; one could treat dance similarly.
Cliff told us about his experience learning Argentine Tango. When he was learning it, the ratio of men to women was 100 to 1, so most of the men learned by dancing with other men.
We thought it would be intriguing to have an ambassador to an alien species learning to dance... or to have the negotiations executed by means of dance.
Kat pointed out that many of the words used to describe physical motions, like gyrate, writhe, etc. are loaded with (potentially problematic) connotation. Depending on the dance tradition you are imagining, its origin and its place within society, that could also be the case for you... or not. But it's important to pay attention to how these value judgments adhere to our descriptions.
Different dances emphasize different body parts. Some entirely ignore parts of the body. Irish dancing focuses mainly on the feet. American dances usually don't assign any significance to the movement of the eyes.
Kate urged us to think about how the dance grows out of a culture, and how it in turn influeces that culture.
Morgan pointed out that precision is necessary for some dances but not others; some dances rely on joyous chaos.
Call-into-center dances are another type of dance. How do you know if you are allowed to take the center spot?
What is the appropriate social context for the form of dance you are exploring?
Cliff told us that capoeira originated with enslaved people in Brazil, who needed a way to defend themselves but could also keep the defensive purpose of the movements secret by describing it also as dancing.
Kat talked about how Eastern European dances were sometimes a form of physical training for young men. The Ukrainian and Russian dance traditions are gender-segregated, and extremely thigh-intensive.
Kate pointed out that there can be important gender differences in how people are allowed to dance.
African dance draws energy from the ground. Ballet relies on the sense of floating on air.
What else might dance be a form of training for? Can we imagine spaceships dancing? Can the motions of caring for someone become a dance?
The sequence of moves is critical to dance, but may be more or less restricted.
Che told us about a news article she'd read about a dance in Japan that was to teach people what to do in a tsunami.
Kate told us how when she went to Africa, she had to teach without speaking, so it came out like dancing.
You can enjoy dances without knowing the forms of symbolism that they employ, but if you are designing a dance and intend to depict its practitioners as coming from inside the culture, you should really know what its symbolism is.
How does disability affect dance? There are differences in mobility, but you can dance in a wheelchair or with almost any other form of physical restriction. Kat noted that where dance is valued, people find a way to do it regardless of difficulty. Be very careful to do your research if you want to deal with questions of how disability might affect dance.
We do make assumptions about how one's physiology might affect one's ability to dance.
Does your dance have the expectation of a special floor (like ballroom or flamenco, for example)? Does it require a stage?
What is the overall style of the dance? Stately? Chaotic? Measured? Stiff? Flowing? A dancer's physical movement can vary greatly on and off the stage. What areas of the room are considered appropriate for which kinds of movement? Is the center for fancy moves, and the outside for fast movement? Or are the edges safer for beginners?
Think about the negative space formed by a dance.
Are you supposed to interact with your audience? With other dancers? Why or why not?
Dance schools have subcultures.
Dance can be a form of acceptable touch in low-touch cultures.
Do you need to have a minimum number of people for a dance to be performed?
How do you manage crowding? How do you manage appropriate or inappropriate touch when there is crowding?
Some dances can be deliberate to send a political message. Some dances can have built-in instructions on how to do the dance (hokey-pokey?)
Some dances start out as scandalous but then over time grow to be considered conservative.
Thank you to everyone who attended this wide-ranging discussion.
Dive into Worldbuilding meets today at 5pm with author Laura Anne Gilman to talk about her Devil's West series. I hope you can join us!
#SFWApro
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