Kimerer LaMothe wants to “overcome” the “conceptual dichotomy between ‘religion’ and ‘dance’ forged in the colonial era that justified western Christian hostility toward dance traditions across six continents over six centuries” (1). She believes that religion and dance are what make us human. She states that we dance because apes who danced—as opposed to apes who didn't—were the primates who became human. Dancing gave them “big brains, empathic hearts, a proclivity for religion, a penchant for cooperating, and ecological adaptability” (6). Her reference for this statement is her 2015 book, Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming.
Her new book is an eccentric mix of philosophy, academic theories—some as startling as the one quoted above—and fervent commitment to her ecokinetic theory of dance and religion. Descartes, Kierkgaard, Nietzche, postmodernism and other academic theories, the shameful history of Christian colonial destruction, and the work of early and contemporary modern dancers are cited to support her theory.
The book's title promises a wider range of study than is delivered. The major focus is local Indigenous dance and religion in the last hundred and fifty years and its destruction by Christian colonialism's conceptual separation of dance and religion. The global religions, except for Christianity as a mostly negative force, are little considered. Buddhism is not included, and only Sufism represents Islam. Hinduism is cited briefly and Judaism somewhat more, with references to the Hebrew Bible and Hasidism.
In the 1970s and 1980s, this reviewer, as a professional dancer and scholar, was part of the Sacred Dance Guild's search for historical foundation for dance in contemporary Christian and Jewish worship. Our enthusiasm sometimes outpaced careful scholarship. The Hebrew Bible includes some dance references, Hasids dance, and (mostly) men dance with the Torah in synagogues. There is no evidence for Christian dance in the canonical gospels, though LaMothe says that “Christians since the time of Jesus” have danced as “worship, prayer, and mystical communion” (3). She feels that Jesus’ Prodigal Son supports this. In Luke 15:25, a slave tells the “good” son that the family is dancing to celebrate the Prodigal's return. This is no more a directive to dance than it is a directive to hold slaves. This is not, of course, evidence against dance. It is evidence that, in the canonical gospels, the question does not arise. There is some medieval and early modern evidence for Christians dancing, and later the Shakers.
The author also states that in my 1978 essay, Theology in the Shape of Dance, I argue for dance as emotion to balance the rational word (72). This is more comic than annoying. Much of my forty-year career in dance and theology has been spent urging against religious dance as emotion. “Emotion” appears once in the essay, in a warning not to take the easy path of dance as emotion, a frequent fallback for unskilled dancers.
In humanity's—if not the apes’—early history, dance and religion were certainly intimately related. They still are for some local groups around the world, like the Kalahari Bushmen whose dance and religion LaMothe presents in excellent and fascinating detail. She concludes by telling us that if we adopt her ecokinetic theory of bodily becoming, and experience dance and religion together on the natural earth, we may save the planet. She seems to see her ecokinetic vision of dance and religion as restoring what we have “lost” to reading and writing, and as healing the long “damage” of literacy. Dancers know and work against the fact that physical and kinetic knowing are mostly absent from academia and little respected in Western culture and religion. Most dancers also know, however, that dance does what language cannot, and that language does what dance cannot. This book seems part of the current fashionable genre of anti-Western and anti-Christian thought and publishing. It leaves me wondering if such work is inviting us to believe in a politically and ecologically correct myth: return to an Eden to which the serpent of linguistic, intellectual, and religious complexity has not and will never come.
