The Muses: Terpsichore or Dance

In this episode, I turn to Terpsichore, the Muse who delights in dance, to ask a deceptively simple question: what is dance, really? Is it ritual, seduction, discipline, freedom—or something far older than language itself?

I trace dance from the ancient Greek chorus and mythic sirens to nightclub chaos at 2 a.m., from courtship rituals in birds to the whirling transcendence of Sufis. Along the way, dance becomes my lens for exploring imitation, sexuality, ritual, power, leisure, and culture itself—how movement encodes who we are long before we can explain it.

Drawing on mythology, anthropology, poetry, and music history, I reflect on why dance resists capture, why it survives prohibition, and why it may be the most democratic of all the arts—requiring no instrument other than the body. From cave paintings to TikTok, from metallurgy to choreography, from Yeats to Nietzsche, Terpsichore reveals dance as both primal impulse and refined discipline: the soul clapping its hands and singing.

https://www.facebook.com/TheMakersRage/
https://www.instagram.com/themakersrage/

Music by LiteSaturation from Pixabay

Transcript

🎙️ The Maker’s Rage Podcast — The Muse Series: Terpsichore

[Intro music fades in]
 Hello, my name's Darren and welcome to the Maker's Rage Podcast. [short pause] So today I'm going to continue the Muse series, which I began some time back with the introduction to the series episode. [pause] Then I followed that up with a very long one on the Epic Muse Calliope, followed by Urania. [pause] The muse of astronomy, the most scientific of the muses.a

[Pause, take a breath]
 It just so happens these two are considered the two most senior of the sorority. [pause] Although I said in the introductory episode, I believe that I would be doing them in no particular order, but as the fancy took me, this time round, I fancy doing an episode on the Muse of Dance. [slight pause] Terpsichore, her name from the Greek simply means Terpos delight and chorus, the dance.

[Short pause]
 So Terpsichore is she who delights in the dance. [pause] For those of you like long, obscure words, remember the adjective terpsichorean, which means relating to dance. [pause] We get the words chorus and choreography from the dancing part of her name. [short pause] The word choreography simply means dance writing or dance notation, because before recorded technology, Instagram, TikTok dancing was – for those who couldn’t afford lessons –  learned from books like The Dancing Master, first published in 1651 by John Playford and went through 77 editions. [pause] I still think it was mainly used as a guide. [pause] People back then and since time immemorial, have learned dance the same way they learn it do now — by seeing it done, imitating it, and practicing until the dancer reaches as near perfection as their talent allows.

[Pause for emphasis]
 The Ancient Greek Chorus, incidentally, was actually a homogenous group of performers who commented with a collective voice on the actions of a scene in a Greek tragedy or comedy. [pause] They variously danced, sang or spoke their lines in unison and wore masks which reflected their emotions as they performed, with features distorted enough that people in the distant choilon seats up the hillside amphitheatre could see. [short pause] Today we associate the chorus less with the dancing and more with the singing. Although the term chorus line still refers to a dancing group.

[Pause]
 Just like the other muses, Terpsichore is associated with numerous lovers. [pause] According to Apollonius of Rhodes, she's the mother of the sirens by the river god Strymon, the sirens whose alluring song led sailors to their doom. [pause] She also had a fling with the war god Ares, and another with the river god, Rhesus Giving birth to a couple of Thracian kings,

[Short pause]
 The father of history, by the way, Herodotus, who has also been called the father of lies, named the nine books of his great chronicle on the Persian Wars The Histories after each of the nine muses. [pause] You feel it's merely a framing device, that the Muses’ association with the narrative in each book is loose at best. [pause] Terpsichore's book is number five, on the Ionian Revolt. [short pause] The Muse of Dance supposedly mirrors the shifting dynamics and fluid movement of the Ionian Rebellion and the counteractions. [pause] To give another example, Book eight, associated with the muse of astronomy, Urania, recounts the naval battles of the Persian Wars — the stars being so important to naval navigators.

[Pause]

Like her eight sisters, Terpsichore has her emblems, which don’t include a pair of dancing shoes, as you might have guessed, but a lyre and a plectrum, indicating that like all the muses, her art has its function in music. [pause] So what is dance? [slight pause] It's supposed to be an art form, although like most art forms, it can be abused depending on the context, 2:00 AM in a nightclub where the sweat peels the paint off the walls. 

[pause] A sequence of bodily movements with aesthetic and often symbolic value, says Wikipedia. [pause] Symbolic indeed, just as with astronomy, where the heavenly spheres were supposed to emit a kind of music. [short pause] And the stars and planets like an ancient Greek chorus, were once thought to dance in accompaniment.

[Pause, slightly slower]
 “One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star,” said Nietzsche. [pause] But Nietzsche’s star, one feels, wouldn’t have its light obscured by an accompanying chorus It is a solitary dancer. 

Anyway, as with singing, we're not the only species on the planet that dances, or appears to. [pause] Just watch how the Birds of Paradise move, or the red-capped manakin moonwalks, the waggle dance of honeybees, and the courtship dances of peacock spiders as well.

[Pause for effect]
 And we know parrots and cockatoos can move rhythmically, intentionally, to music. [pause] Dolphins exhibit rhythmic movements that could be considered dance, and even male mudskippers twirl their tails and arch their bodies during courtship. [short pause] We can argue the motive isn't always the same, but we recognize the manifestation. [pause] And how far back have humans danced? Since before we stood up on two legs, no doubt, since before we spoke.

[Pause]
 Our cousins, the apes aren't exactly noted for their rhythm, although chimpanzees in the wild have been observed performing rain dances, swaying and strutting when hearing rain. [pause] Chimps in captivity as well have also been seen swaying, tapping and clapping in response to music — perhaps suggesting a predisposition to rhythm. Or are they just imitating us? I said dancing begins in imitation. But one feels for apes, master of dance, isn’t the end it has in mind. Perhaps a slice of apple or a peanut.

[Short pause]
 Still, with their comparatively big brains, none of the apes can compare with the Birds of Paradise. [pause] And why do birds dance? [slight pause] The same reason they sing: sex, of course. [pause] And although we humans have ritualized it, sublimated it into an art form, most people in history, let's keep it real, have associated dancing with copulation.

[Pause]
 Erato presides over love, poetry and song. [short pause] But when the male bird sings, can we call it love? [pause] Is the bird of paradise in love or lust, or mere infatuation when it dances? [pause] Does it distinguish his Juliet as a “snowy dove trooping with Crows”? Of course not, because it will perform the same dance to the next female bird that passes by, and be as fickle and inconstant as the moon, which Romeo swears by. [pause]

[Short pause]
 Love birds, on the other hand, are named such because of the strong lifelong pair bonds they form with their chosen mate. [pause] Yet they cannot sing; they putter, squeak and chatter like most human couples, I suppose. [pause] No one with an appreciation for poetry will deny that John Keats could sing, at least with his words. [short pause] Yet he called a nightingale’s song “a high requiem,” perhaps interpreting what he heard, or foreshadowing his early death at 25, and the end of all promise of fulfillment with the love of his life, Fanny Brawne. [pause] So of course, the nightingale isn’t singing a high requiem. [short pause] It's just doing what its genome has programmed it to do in order to secure a mate.

[Pause]
 Anyway, I indicated earlier that humans are the only extant apes with a real proclivity for dancing, and it seems we've been dancing at least as long as we've been able to depict it in art. [pause] TikTok hasn't been around that long, and until recorded technology, dancing has perhaps been the most elusive of the arts. [short pause] Fragments of ancient songs, although rare, do exist even from Bronze Age, Ancient Greece and Rome. [Pause]
 All we know of how people danced before moving pictures are still moments, attitudes frozen in time: from the 9,000-year-old cave paintings of Bhimbetka in India to the dancers depicted on Greek vases, to the bestselling Dancing Master textbook I mentioned earlier, which was used as recently as the 19th century.

[Pause]
 Alan Lomax, who you might remember from my episode about Pacts with the Devil, was a huge fan of blues music — and I can't fault him for that. [short pause] I do have my issues with his choreometric cross-cultural analysis of dance, though, and movement style. [pause] For example, he correlates carving motions in dance with cultures who have developed metallurgy. [pause] He's even confident enough to quote stats asserting that in 80% of cultures where metal tools are used, or where metal has become traditional, this is reflected in the curvilinear nature of their dance, because their dancing supposedly reflects the use of the tools — for example, the sweeping motion of the scythe, or the way a swordsman wheels their weapon.

[Pause]
 More primitive or less developed cultures tend to restrict their dancing in one dimension: up or down, left or right. [pause] Metallurgy is associated with greater productivity, and centralization of government. [short pause] More productive societies have more time, more leisure to develop their dances. [pause] The more developed they become, the more skilled, and the more practice is required to master them. [short pause] And thus, we have the creation of a specialist class, like the scribes, who communicate not in writing but in movement: the spirit and ethos of their culture.

[Transition, slightly lifted tone]
 And ritual is its primary function across cultures — India, China, Islam — though in some places, like Iran, dance was prohibited due to the mingling of the sexes. [pause] Yet Sufism presents an exception: think of Rumi and the whirling dervishes, mystical spinning for greater communion with God, the body itself as vessel of transcendence. [short pause] Across Africa, dance has always been inseparable from ritual, a language of invocation, initiation, and celebration — and when African people were transplanted to the New World, these movements survived and transmogrified, giving rise to new rhythms and new forms, from samba to jazz, from tap to hip-hop.

[Pause]
 Of course, most of us today dance simply to enjoy ourselves. [short pause] Terpsichore, remember, means delight in dance. [pause] Most of us are jittering erratically, arms flailing, feet shuffling, moving however the music takes us. [pause] But what Terpsichore would truly call dance is highly stylized: choreographed, practiced, skillful kinaesthetic movement, bodies in dialogue with rhythm and lyric, gesture aligned with music and song. [short pause] 

[Pause]
 Ritual ultimately gave way to entertainment: Lully, Nijinsky. But despite Swan Lake, there is music that induces in us a primitive impulse to move. And not in a stylized highly choreographed way (think 2am in the nightclub!) And so improvisation democratises dance in a way that isn’t feasible with the other arts. How many of us can pick up and instrument we’ve never played and just start improvising? It may have been difficult to capture in painting, in notation, in a textbook like the Dancing Master, but it is nevertheless the most accessible of the arts, since we’re already possessed of the only instrument needed to execute it, our bodies.

[Pause, reflective tone]
 Poets and painters have long tried to capture the motion of dance in a medium other than the body. [short pause] William Carlos Williams, describing Bruegel’s peasants, writes in The Dance:

“They were dancing and the music
 was in them, in their feet,
 and they went on, spinning and spinning,
 a whirl of bodies in the village square.”

[Pause]
 Yeats, in Sailing to Byzantium, writes:

“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
 A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
 Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
 For every tatter in its mortal dress.”

[Pause, slower, inspired tone]
 But as these examples illustrate, in words, dancing becomes something else, a metaphor, something that transcends the merely physical. [pause] But dancing in essence can only be realised if merely physical, it can only be manifested when the soul claps its hands and sings.

[Pause, slower, reflective tone]
 The only way to capture dance was to make it stop happening, exanimate it, like a dead flower, a body without the soul. [pause] “Oh body swayed to music,” said William Butler Yeats in Among School Children. [short pause] “Oh brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?” [pause]

[Outro music fades in, gradually]