Dance

this tiny thing breaking it down. I was a teenager then, but I was legitimately taken aback, Like, how does this brand new, soft little person know how to do that? Already? She doesn't know any words yet, she can't walk. She's like a cheese curd with arms and legs. So where does she learn how to dance? And why does she do it when we sing the Tinka think song? Why

indeed does music animate you or me? Why do we toe tap or chair dance or just not along while typing, I'm Dessa, You're listening to deeply human and in less than half an hour you're going to have a basic understanding of why people dance. So get ready to impress everyone at the next raid with your shouted explanations. Oh God, when you hear music that you like, there's a chill that starts from your head and goes all the way down to your feet and then it comes back up

the other side. And so that chill, that feeling, you just take it and ride that right into the movement. Okay, But then, if you are fortunate, you will experience that point where you just completely leave your body. Everything gets blurry. I'll see like um, kind of like an orange light. Sometimes it's silver, and then it's like I'm at another location in the room, and then I'm watching myself dance. And that's the feeling that every dancer wants, you know,

like you want that feel. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it's the best thing that's happened all year. Darien Parker is a dancer and instructor with Comb Bay Center for African Diaspora Dance in New York, and he is dancing like a cent of the time. Yeah, even if I'm not teaching or performing, I'm always dancing

in my room or in my head. I'm always making up choreography or imagining myself doing something or yeah, wait, are you saying that, like in the way that I might have a song stuck in my head, you might have a dance stuck in your head? Oh yeah, all the time. Darien may pose a particularly intense example, but there's neuroscientific evidence that all human brains are inclined to move when we listen to music. When people are simply

listening to music and yeah, not's moving their body. That's still in their brain, we see that that there's motor activation when they listen to music. Our motor cortex becomes activated. So that's the part of the brain that is responsible for the planning, control and execution of voluntary movements. So even if we do not move, we are inclined to move.

Our brain wants to move. That's Edith van Dyke. She studies the way that people interact with music at Ghent University in Belgium, and her account of our brains dancing in our heads reminds me of like an office space when a good song comes on and everybody's dancing in their chairs. It's just this automatic urge to move. Edith says that our ability to process music might be built

in just like languages. So there's something in our brain, that is their naturally that makes us respond to music, but so also in the bodily way also moving to music, there's evidence of the music acquisition module in our brains. Research indicates that infants, as for the example of baby Jesse, moved to beats well before they're a year old, which seems to suggest it's innate, were predisposed to move to music. On a personal time scale, you probably made your first

dance move before you can remember it. And on an anthropological time scale, Edith says the dancing most likely started with our species Homo sapiens, as opposed with other earlier hominids, and dancing has likely been instrumental in binding us to one another on the long term. Actually, something that has been in dance at all times in our history is the social aspect. So moving together can be regarded as a sort of social glue you increase your social bonding.

Take for example, a rain dance. Probably there were a lot of people in the communities who believed that when times were hearts and there wasn't a lot of rain and crops were going to fill, that's when you are dancing to the gods, that it would start to rape some people might have believed that, but it's initially started from keeping the group together because in hard times, when there's not enough foods, there might be starvation, which can

leads to fights, to wars and so on. So it is key to keep the group together to bear all of this together, social cohesion, motor cortex activation. I admit that I sort of thought an evolutionary explanation of dance was going to be mostly about sex, like you know that whole thing. Dance is a vertical expression of a horizontal desire that stuff, of course. Yeah, well, okay, when you dance, it's a sexual display of fitness. You show that you're physically fits, but also that you have a

good working brain because you can conceptualize about things. You understand the music when you have good feeling of rhythm. You could see it like that, moving in sync and with style. Maybe the mark of a good mate. Okay, no anyone who implied. But now let's turn back to our dancer, Darien. His focus is on West African traditions where specific dances are integral to the culture. So when you talk about dance West African dances, it's done in

West Africa. You're talking about things that pretty much mark every aspect of life, you know, So if someone passes away, if there's a wedding, if there's a birth of a child, if there's an initiation ceremony for a young girl or for a young boy, pretty much all aspects of life. The dance is very much an articulation of the philosophical system, you know, of the people. Can you explain that what

does that mean? A dance that I'm teaching now is a traditional dance for the Malnqua people, and this is a dance in which young girls mark their right of passage into womanhood. So there's one movement done, for instance, in which you reach to the sky, you come into your body, and then you put your arms behind you, and you keep doing that and repetitions the sky, come

into your body with your arms behind. So essentially what you're communicating is I take blessings from God, I bring them into my body, and then I scattered them throughout the earth. And then I take what I scattered throughout the earth, I bring them into my body and then I give it back as an offering unto God. And the ma Linqua people believe in that kind of constant flow between k of the ethereal, the personal, and then

the rest of society. So yeah, that one movement you kind of expressed that aspect of ma Linque philosophy behind Sky come Into and West African traditions. The body's movement is also the adduct of a really tight relationship between the dancers and the musicians who play with them. Like I've heard drummers bragging did you see the way I made him rip his own shirt? Okay, that does not refer to a dancer who like tears his shirt down

the middle like some cheesy adonis. It's essentially about dancing a shirt into pieces. So if a drummer notices that a particular move seems to strain a dancer's garment, the drummer will get the dancer to do it again and again and with more and more intensity until the fabric just can't hold. Drummers are very very observant, skilled people,

and they're like magicians. And I remember one time I was dancing to Mama die Kata, who is known as like the pre eminent master drummer of Guinea and dancing God Rest his soul. But I had the privilege of dancing in a class where he was playing the lead and he had had two drums strapped together and he was playing them at the same time. And I will never forget this, the way his eyes were in tuned

to what my body was doing. And it was the first time in my life that I have ever felt weightless, like I was doing all these complicated things, but I didn't feel anything. He was making my body move. Just feel like being merryonetted. Almost. Yeah, it kind of does feel like being merrionetted, but it's actually something even more transcendent than that. It's like you feel nothing. The drummers can move the dancers, and it's a two way street.

The dancers can influence the drummer's performance too. The goal in West African dance or the styles that I do, is to have a perfect connection with the music and the live musicians. There has to be kind of like perfect synchronicity between you and the musicians. That conversation has to be fluid. When that is the case, you will feel a physical kind of healing of your body. When I was in my early twenties, I helped teach a salsa class, which makes me sound like a way better

dancer than I am. Essentially, I would just show up early and learn the moves from Don, the real instructor, so that he could demonstrate them to the class with the help of a female lead. And Don was this gay dude who, by his own description, would go dancing flaming like butane, and so to make it look like we had chemistry when we danced in front of an audience, he'd sometimes whisper threats like um he would say, I'm going to cut you the nature of a dip, and

I'd giggle, and that would sell our rapport to the crowd. Anyway. I remember struggling to get this really flashy spin. It was a fast double turn that involved ducking under the dude's arm, and it was awesome. It was super hard. I asked Don to slow it down. I'm real cerebral, and I wanted to talk through each step one by one, and he just flatly refused. You can't learn it that way, he said, you gotta feel it. Just let the music guide you, close your eyes and humble your mind to

your body. How old were you when you started performing as a musician in dance classes? Nineteen when I played dance for a dance studio do you remember the first day? No, and what instrument did you play piano? And what kind of stuff did you play on the piano. Dance teacher was a French lady. She liked the Greek movie Sober of the Greek. She got fixed safe and I sat played different versions of the Greek. That is Craig Harris. He's loved music and rhythm since he was a kid.

He studied composition and even though he grew up to pursue a totally different career path, he always wrote music for dance on the side. But then something started to change in Craig's body. H In around two thousand six or two thousand five. I had weird imbalance and strange kind of heavy body feeling, and it was a mystery that no one could diagnose. It's like everything has weights on it. My body feels a little heavier, so anything you do is a little harder, a little more work.

There was also a marked stiffness, a sense of rigidity. It would be like, um, if you're really cold. Then a tremor in his left hand. Craig went back to the doctor. He's a German doctor and he's very straightforward, and he said, well, I'm sorry to tell you this, but I'm afraid you have Parkinson's. Parkinson's disease is a progressive nervous system disorder that affects movement, and it can

make everyday motions difficult. People with Parkinson's might not swing their arms when they walk, or have difficulty writing or making facial expressions. Movement can be especially difficult to initiate. In late stage Parkinson's, people can experience freezing, rendering someone temporarily unable to move or walk at all. People sometimes describe it is feeling glued to the floor. There's no cure, but medication can help treat Parkinson's symptoms, and rhythm can too.

Music can actually help people lock into a more natural walking gate, taking longer, more confident steps. There's even a new smartphone app that uses ankle sensors to collect data on the gate of Parkinson's patients and then plays music at a tempo designed to keep them moving smoothly. Craig enrolled in a dance class designed for people with Parkinson's disease.

I talked to one of Craig's instructors, Maria Walsh from Motion Pacific Dance, and she said that If a dancer freezes midstep in class, introducing a little bit of rhythm can help break the hold. She'll have them home a little rhythm, then try to stomp it and eventually walk to it again. Craig doesn't suffer from freezing, but he does notice that dance eases his symptoms. I moved a little easier and lighter, and I felt a little lighter

psychologically but physically too. Dance is both therapy and a way to elevate my spirits. It seems to have the effect of making things more fluid physically and mentally for me, and rhythm holds the same magnetism for him that it did as a teenager. It feels like pretty much the same as it does when you don't have Parkinson's. You know, it just feels good. So how exactly do music and dance therapy help people with conditions like Parkinson's. Back to Edith,

our Belgian researcher for a bit of neuroscience. Keeping the beat is believed to be hardwired in her brain too, So we actually we see that our neurals the connections in our brain that they can synchronize their firing to musical beats. When we move, we tend to synchronize in certain ways to music. We tend to connect to the sounds and to the vibrations and so on. A research suggests that when we listen to a song, some of our brain waves can actually sink to the tempo. Are

synapses fire and time with the music. Okay, a quick reminder here that the phrase it's all just vibrations man, is not allowed on this program. If all of a person's brain waves were perfectly aligned, it wouldn't mean they were enlightened. It could mean that they're having a seizure. So let's just keep it empirical. But yes, it is pretty awesome that our brain waves are believed to align with what's on the stereo, and that neurological alignment may

be part of what prompts us to dance. The electrical impact is passing through the parts of our brain responsible for movement are already dialed into the tempo, which maybe why it is really challenging to dance out of sync with the beat. I'm not dancing to the music. I can sometimes jump in rhythm with the music. I can go against it. I can completely forget about the music and do something else. Is it difficult to avoid the temptation to dance to be just because that's kind of

maybe naturally what we're inclined to do. Yeah, it's interesting, I think it is. I think it takes training and retraining too long to do that. This is Vangeline. She specializes in a form of dance called Bhutto. Bhutto is an art phone that came from Japan in the nineteen fifties. It's an avant garde art phone and it's kind of like the dance of the subconscious, exploration of the unconscious. Photo is sometimes called the dance of darkness, and it

is unlike any dance you've ever seen. Tatsumihi Jakata, one of the choreographers who created Bhutto, would sometimes fast before performances for a dramatic, emaciated look. He and other dancers would often cover their bodies in bone white paint before taking stage. I'd only run across Bhutto once years ago, having accidentally stumbled across a YouTube link, and in it, the body of a tall, hairless man painted lunar white

falls down a stone staircase. He pieces himself back together at the bottom, moving with so many tightly controlled, isolated movements. It's as if there were tiny rotors spinning in each joint. He doesn't look human. He looks like a first failed hybrid of machine and man, able to suffer but not survive. And one gets the sense that the kind thing to do would be to find a rock and put the thing out of its misery, but also that you'd never be able to summon the grit to do it yourself. Booto.

It's it's just intense man. She was purely Japanese. Then it moved to Europe in the seventies, and then it exploded all over the world. Vangeline is from France, but she studied in Japan and Mexico. When I asked about the aesthetic of bhutto, it seems like I just sort of missed the point. It's also much about how it looks as how it feels. So if you're watching you budo performance, probably you you're having some kind of people

have very violent response. They hate it, they love it, they go into a deep trance, they relax, some people leave, and I really offended. Like I think when it began, people were fainting when they were watching bud So there's that kind of visceral response from the body when you actually watch it, Bhutto often moves faster or slower than the way we do in our normal lives, and it incorporates some gestures and expressions that aren't really allowed in public.

And when you think about it, we've got a pretty narrow band of just and expressions that are allowed in public. Like if a person blinks too frequently, that might be enough to weird you out. Let alone, twisting or bending their torso, or curling and unfurling their toes. There's a lot that's just off limits. All day long, we watch people moving a certain way in the way that society has kind of taught us to move walking down the street, Like right now we're talking to each other, were standing

in a specific way. So if I start doing movements that are a little bit strange or different, or that are considered scary or possibly sexual, or you know, outside of the realm of what's socially acceptable, then that immediately provokes the viewer. So there's that aspect to bule of that da and consciousness of the body brings types of movement that we're not really accustomed to seeing in public. I went to Vangeline Studio to try it for myself. It's a single room in Brooklyn and a building near

the train. Soft rubber mats on the floor fit together like puzzle pieces, and a sign on the door says no shoes. Okay, full disclosure. I find Vangeline almost pathologically likable. You will hear that in my voice while we are dancing, and I am not sorry. She is just so likable. Yeah, And you can totally use the mirror because it's there. The mirror is awesome. Is that helpful or is that? I like the mirror? Vanity is good? Why not? At first Vangeline said I could move anyway I wanted. We

were just going to experiment with rhythm. Okay. So the first one is you just try to move with the beat. Anything. Now I'm going to try it to move against the beat, okay, okay, so no, because it's home. It's really hard, man. It is so hard. It's like patch your head and rub your tummy hard. Your body just does not want to do it. Also, it became clear how impoverished my own inventory of movements is. I was reusing moves already like half a minute in, but Vangeline was doing all sorts

of stuff simple steps to like zombie vibes. You can have very tiny tremors and movement that in Japanese they call faint soft fructuations, like something's passing through your face, one little movement of your fingertip, and then you can go from macro to micro, and you can go from the very exclusive to total stillness. I'm not sure I would have been bold enough to try bootle with just anyone, but Vangeline was so compassionate and also really smart. She

made me feel comfortable enough to risk looking foolish. And if Booto's aim is to invite the full scope of our humanity to the dance, well, fear and foolishness, they're surely part of it. There was is also just a joy contagion. Vangeline is electrified by bhutto, and I was near enough to catch some sparks. YEA, thank you so much. The effort it takes to dance against the beat in a form like bhutto is evidence of just how sensitive

we are to rhythm. We are primed for music, so for instance, just nature sounds or sounds on the streets or something can become musical to you. That, of course was Edith. Again. I make my living as a musician, and when I'm in the van with my band and we're stopped at a red light waiting to make a turn, I have noticed on more than one occasion that all of us are like grooving to the clicking of the

turn signal. Edith says, there's another theory about why we're compelled to dance, one that's totally different from anything we've heard so far, and it has to do with our appetite for control. Well, there is a thing called agency. That's a theoretical idea about the fact that when you feel in control of things, it makes you feel good. It's motivating, it's fun. So you're kind of imitating your music, but it can also feel as if you are creating.

It's because you're dancing more strongly, fiercely, and so on. Yeah, that's something you can clearly have when you're listening to music and you play the musical director. That sense of agency all over, so you act as if you are making the music yourself, which feels awesome. What do you mean when you act as a musical director. You're talking about like air guitar. Yeah, I was talking about like a director of a symphonic orchestra. But yeah, air guitar

is exactly the same, of course. Yeah. For all her knowledge about the complex neurological and psychological underpinnings of dance, Edith has a pretty simple takeaway message. We should all dance more. People who think that it's just some past time are so wrong, because it's much more than that, and it can help us in so many ways. I sort of dance almost every morning when my kids are up, everybody's downstairs. I usually shower a little bit later than

the rest. I put on my music and I danced in the bethroom, and I usually come down for breakfast in the way more positive states than when I got off. If we can all get over our self consciousness, dancing just feels good, and we do it because it connects us to one another like social glue. We sometimes dance because it's sexy and proves we are too. And dancing

has become folded into our big cultural rituals. The first slow dance at weddings ringed by wet eyed spectators, the waltz, the new dresses and borrowed car for prom, the doofy Congo line, at a work party that started ironic and ends up awesome. We dance because our bodies are built to move to music, and maybe also because shredding and air guitar solo feels red. Well. You know that end of program sound as well as I do. But we cannot shut down this show about music and dance without

a killer dance jam. We used to call that stuff boots and pants music when I was a kid, because you know, boots and pants and boots and pants and boots. Okay, we're not technically allowed to use commercial music on this program, but that will not stop us. I hit up my friend Laser Beak to ask if he could hook me up with a Dink a Dink dance remix, and oh my goodness, did Beaks a legend God come through? DNC

ding ding? Come on? Are you hearing man? This is gonna own the club circuit Ma York to Miami, Pop of the Summer Guarantee. Deeply Human is a BBC World Service and American Public Media co production with I Heart Media, and it's hosted by Mesa. Find me online, Tessa on Instagram and Tessa Darling on Twitter. This one's for you, baby, Jesse Hey, I just want to see you dance for me on the next Deeply Human, why is the human

animal modest? We're so modest, in fact, that we can be reluctant to undress even to save our own lives, say in a case of exposure to a biotoxin. Join me next time to find out why you are not naked and neither of mine.