Movin' an' a-groovin'

Here's a comment I posted last year on Scientific American, on a piece about why we like dancing so much. 

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=experts-dance

choppam at 08:47 AM on 04/21/09

The parallel with sex is good  here - limber, coordinated, improvisational sex produces its own excitement and release, and good, tight, individual bonding. And D Marchant's comment: "Mirror Neurons are just structural evidence that we are wired for social harmonic unity, and unified rhythmic movement reinforces these social bonds" ties in with his observation about "group synchrony.  So-called "primitive" tribal dance rituals organize individuals into collective group entities that hunt better, resist predation better and act as one larger organism than individuals alone." 

Getting the cacophony of individual conflicting interests, emotions etc (due to status, gender, age etc) into synch is imperative for effective group functioning - think orchestras or sports teams. Music and dance achieve this - the greater the crescendo and the freer the orgasmic release, the better for us and our groups.

Which just shows how inhuman and sclerotic our present puritanical anti-sensual society is and how great the need is to change it to a more liberating and energizing society where schools give our kids a deep confidence and mastery of rhythm and harmony and interaction and creativity in their earliest and most formative years. With this foundation they'll be able to work together better and learn together better later when it comes to more abstract things like science, logic, maths, etc - theoretical analysis and synthesis.

So Wilhelm Reich and his followers were bang on target with the central place they gave orgasmic release in their theory - and the necessity for loosening up, sloughing off body "armour", moving and a-grooving, reeling with the feeling, rocking and a-rolling, etc. 

Excellent!

And of course, a lot of studies that you all know better than I do have shown that music and song target different parts of the brain from less rhythmic more discursive language. 

Which also (since it's all hardwired) shows that attempting to suppress rhythm, dance, music, poetry etc (as certain puritanical sects or regimes do) or to corral them into commercially profitable industrially bullwhipped sectors (Big Entertainment - Hollywood, Recording, etc) or to turn it all into some kind of hyper-exclusive minority activity (Big Art, Dance, Performance, etc) is as hopeless an enterprise as trying to stop the tide coming in, or trying to ban electricity.