DANCE ON A CONTINUUM OF MYTH AND RITUAL: CULTURAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASPECTS

Abstract

At the present stage of choreographic culture development a tendency to synthesize elements of modern choreography and traditional (ancient, archaic) dance can be observed. In this context, the study of dance is actualized in its historical and cultural formation, in its genetic connections with ritual, myth, and sacred human experience. The aim of the article is to conduct a cultural and anthropological analysis of dance in the structure of the mytho-ritual continuum. Being based on the methodological apparatus of cultural anthropology, dance is studied not only as a kind of art, but primarily as a multifaceted cultural phenomenon, which integrally combines natural and cultural, physical and spiritual, tradition and innovation, the sacred and the profane. It is assumed that dance was not only a component of the mytho-ritual continuum, but also was its structure-forming element. It was determined that the main function of dance in the structure of the mytho-ritual continuum is the figurative-plastic representation of the human worldview and the sacralized human corporeality. In conclusion to the article it is noted that in the process of its historical formation dance was being formed as an important structural element of the mytho-ritual continuum. Moreover, dance was not only a component of this continuum, but the element that determines its structure. It was the link between the myth and the ritual, which transformed the physical space-time continuum into a symbolic, mytho-ritual one. Such a dance represented the idea of man about the sacred and at the same time it was a way of special figurative-plastic communication between man and the sacred (totem animals, ancestral spirits, gods, etc.). The main function of dance in the structure of the mytho-ritual continuum is considered to be the figurative representation of the human worldview and of the sacralized human corporeality as a symbolic counterpart of the sacred universe. This dominant function determines the peculiarities of the other functions of dance, such as: ritual and magical, communicative, narrative, integrative, edifying, cathartic, etc.