All-night Dances
These happenings go on throughout the entire night. Elizabeth Marshall says, people will get tired, but they will not stop, because it is important to keep going until sunrise. Sometimes the younger people will endure no longer and might leave the dance circle, but the older people never falter. When the first light of dawn shows on the horizon they gather extra energy; they will sing louder and dance faster. As the sun rises the dance reaches a “final most powerful intensity”, and then will suddenly stop. Sandy Gall, author of The Bushmen of Southern Africa, states that after a healing dance they “collapse in exhaustion” until the next day, when, fully recovered, they share their trance experiences with one another.
Elizabeth Marshall informs that, the reason these dances are held all through the night is because of tradition started long ago. It is a known fact that at sunrise and sunset, when the warm air and cool air of night pass each other sound carries the best. It has to do with the density of the two kinds of air; sound travels the best in dense cool air. Back when the first Bushmen lived, the land was empty and quiet, and very few things made loud noises in the Kalahari Desert. So in the dry cool air the sound of people holding a trance dance could be heard almost twenty miles. This sound could have been a notice to others far away that a large number of people was somewhere nearby. So the people wanted to continue their trance dances until dawn, when the sound travels the farthest.
Read more about this topic: Bushmen Healing And Rock Art
Famous quotes containing the word dances:
“When I wrote of the women in their dances and wildness, it was a mask,
on their mountain, gold-hunting, singing, in orgy,
it was a mask; when I wrote of the god,
fragmented, exiled from himself, his life, the love gone down with song,
it was myself, split open, unable to speak, in exile from myself.
...
No more masks! No more mythologies!”
—Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980)