Interpretive dance is a family of dance styles that seeks to translate particular feelings and emotions, human conditions, situations, or fantasies into movement and dramatic expression combined. It can also translate major characteristics of any traditional ethnic movements into more modern expressions through exploration of the origins, cultural influences, rhythms, movements, emotional manifestations, and intonations, as well as the stories inherent in the dances themselves.
Likened to the higher form of arts, interpretive dance can be seen in many Broadway musicals as well as in other forms of mainstream and non-mainstream media. While it was—and most often, still is—thought of as a performing art, interpretive dance does not have to be performed with music.
Often the style includes grand, eloquent movements, like wide swooshes of the arms, spins, and drops to the floor. It is frequently enhanced by lavish costumes, ribbons, or spandex body suits. Interpretive dance sometimes includes costumes as many different characters.
Famous quotes containing the words interpretive and/or dance:
“The ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide. As such, it both affirms and denies its own nature.”
—Paul De Man (1919–1983)
“No imperfection in budded mountain,
Valleys breathe, heaven and earth move together,
daisies push inches of yellow air, vegetables tremble,
green atoms shimmer in grassy mandalas,
sheep speckle the mountainside, revolving their jaws with empty eyes,
horses dance in the warm rain,”
—Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926)