Gouvernement du Manitoba
Manitoba

Arts Education

Dance


The Nature of the Dance Discipline

Dance enriches a vibrant culture and is integral to human life. It has the power to illuminate, deepen, broaden, and enhance human experience. dance offers a unique way of perceiving, interpreting, and communicating diverse life worlds. As one of the oldest and most primal of the performing arts, dance has existed across all cultures and historical periods. It has always been a socially significant component of all civilizations, and remains a relevant symbolic tool for people around the globe today.

As an expressive art form, dance provides an embodied, physical form and language for conveying images, meaning, and feelings. in this sense, dance offers both the message and the medium. dance experiences contribute to personal, social, economic, cultural, and civic aspects of human lives. Invariably, dance serves various purposes that permeate cultures worldwide, including performing, healing, entertaining, celebrating, socializing, learning, worshiping, becoming physically fit, and communicating.

Dance has interpretive and functional powers that enrich and fulfill the human experience. Body, mind, and spirit are united in dance in ways that engage people profoundly as they seek meaning in the world around them. Dance intentionally fosters the habits of mind that enable people to question, develop a sense of agency, tolerate ambiguity, cope with uncertainty, consider alternative perspectives, and imagine new possibilities.