Dance Dance is an The arts, art form, consisting of sequences of body movements with aesthetic and often Symbol, symbolic value, either improvised or purposefully selected. Dance can be categorized and described by its choreography, by its repertoir ...

s centered around

drum The drum is a member of the percussion group of musical instruments. In the Hornbostel–Sachs classification system, it is a membranophone. Drums consist of at least one membrane, called a drumhead or drum skin, that is stretched over a ...

s are performed in many cultures. Anthropologists sometimes refer to these as "drum dances". Drum dances may have various kinds of spiritual or social significance.

Kalahari Desert

Anthropologist Richard Katz reports on a drum dance that the !Kung people in the

Kalahari Desert The Kalahari Desert is a large semiarid climate, semiarid sandy savanna in Southern Africa covering including much of Botswana as well as parts of Namibia and South Africa. It is not to be confused with the Angolan, Namibian, and South African ...

perform. In !Kung, the dance is called !Gwah tsi. The dance takes a few hours. Women dancers form a horseshoe shape around a male drummer. The dancers may experience a spiritual sensation called kia while they dance.

North America

Dene and Slavey

When

Dene The Dene people () are an Indigenous group of First Nations who inhabit the northern boreal, subarctic and Arctic regions of Canada. The Dene speak Northern Athabaskan languages and it is the common Athabaskan word for "people". The term ...

drum dances are performed, the performers aim to get their audience to dance. If everyone in the audience gets up, the style of music changes. At some point in the cycle, the drummers stop drumming and the audience and performers sing and dance together. Slavey perform a drum dance led by a group of

frame drum A frame drum is a drum that has a drumhead width greater than its depth. It is one of the most ancient musical instruments, and perhaps the first drum to be invented. It has a single drumhead that is usually made of rawhide, but man-made mat ...

players. The Slavey drum dance has components including the tea dance and round dance.

Haudenosaunee

As of 1985, a drum dance was performed on the Six Nations of the Grand River. It was led by a drum player, who also sang, assisted by a horn rattle performer. Anthropologist Gertrude Prokosch Kurath watched drum dances at the Six Nations reserve and reported that the dance had four major parts: (1) an introduction, (2) the procession of dancers into the

longhouse A longhouse or long house is a type of long, proportionately narrow, single-room building for communal dwelling. It has been built in various parts of the world including Asia, Europe, and North America. Many were built from lumber, timber and ...

followed by singing, (3) a set of chants and prayers, and (4) a recapitulation of part 2, the singing phase.

Innu

Innu The Innu/Ilnu ('man, person'), formerly called Montagnais (French for ' mountain people'; ), are the Indigenous Canadians who inhabit northeastern Labrador in present-day Newfoundland and Labrador and some portions of Quebec. They refer to ...

drum dances or circle dances are called innuniminanu. Innuniminanu are performed with only one drummer.

Inuit

The and

throat singing Throat singing refers to several vocal practices found in different cultures worldwide. These vocal practices are generally associated with a certain type of guttural voice that contrasts with the most common types of voices employed in singing, wh ...

are two traditional forms of

Inuit music Traditional Inuit music (sometimes Eskimo music, Inuit-Yupik music, Yupik music or Iñupiat music), the music of the Inuit, Yupik peoples, Yupik, and Iñupiat, has been based on drums used in dance music as far back as can be known, and a vocal s ...

. Inuit drum dance songs, or pisiq, are typically based on a five-note scale. They usually have a

strophic form Strophic form – also called verse-repeating form, chorus form, AAA song form, or one-part song form – is a song structure in which all verses or stanzas of the text are sung to the same music. Contrasting song forms include through-composed, ...

. The drum played during the Inuit drum dance is called a qilaut. Copper Inuit use the drum dance "to honour members of the family, to express gratitude, and to welcome and bid farewell to visitors". Jean-Jacques Nattiez describes a drum dance in

Igloolik Igloolik ( Inuktitut syllabics: , ''Iglulik'', ) is an Inuit hamlet in Foxe Basin, Qikiqtaaluk Region in Nunavut, northern Canada. Because its location on Igloolik Island is close to Melville Peninsula, it is often mistakenly thought to be o ...

as an "endurance competition" in which performers are tested on their recall of songs and ability to keep performing as long as possible.

Ojibwe

The drum used for

Ojibwe The Ojibwe (; Ojibwe writing systems#Ojibwe syllabics, syll.: ᐅᒋᐺ; plural: ''Ojibweg'' ᐅᒋᐺᒃ) are an Anishinaabe people whose homeland (''Ojibwewaki'' ᐅᒋᐺᐘᑭ) covers much of the Great Lakes region and the Great Plains, n ...

drum dances, sometimes called the "dream drum", has been considered sacred. It may be treated as a living thing. A story says that the dance drum was brought by a

Sioux The Sioux or Oceti Sakowin ( ; Dakota/ Lakota: ) are groups of Native American tribes and First Nations people from the Great Plains of North America. The Sioux have two major linguistic divisions: the Dakota and Lakota peoples (translati ...

woman called Tailfeather Woman or Turkey Tailfeather Woman to the Ojibwe. According to the ethnomusicologist Thomas Vennum, this story is accurate and the events it describes likely occurred in the 1870s. Elaine Keillor says the date was 1877. Several anthropologists agree that the Ojibwe drum dance, rooted in this origin story, derives from the grass dance. Vennum uses the word "society" to describe the groups that perform the grass and drum dances. Drum dance societies are composed of a drum owner, singers, and others.

Tłı̨chǫ

Tłı̨chǫ The Tłı̨chǫ (, ) people, sometimes spelled Tlicho and also known as the Dogrib, are a Dene First Nations people of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group living in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Name The name ''Dogrib' ...

drum dances, called Eye t'a dagowo, happen at nighttime. Dancers move clockwise, single file, in a circle.

Yup'ik and Iñupiat

Yup'ik and

Iñupiat The Inupiat (singular: Iñupiaq), also known as Alaskan Inuit, are a group of Alaska Natives whose traditional territory roughly spans northeast from Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the northernmost part of the Canada–United States borde ...

drum dances are composed of repeated musical phrases. The drum played in these dances is called a suayaq or kilaun. Nicole Beaudry, describing a Yup'ik drum dance she saw in Alaska in the late 1980s, says that there were four or five drummers who sat together on a bench, singing, surrounded by dancers. Sometimes, a drummer who wanted to dance would be replaced by one of the surrounding dancers.

Papua New Guinea

Anthropologist Nancy Munn describes a drum dance done on Gawa Island, one of the Marshall Bennett Islands. The dance is generally held nightly at some point in the year. It is a way for young people to meet potential sexual partners. The dance occurs around a tree called the dabedeba tree; drummers and singers stand there when the dance is going on.

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