Sacred Dances

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Dance carries religious weight across traditions in more than one register. It can be an offering of devotion, danced toward a deity rather than for an audience, as in classical Indian temple dance traditions such as Bharatanatyam, historically performed by temple dancers before it became a staged art form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It can also be a vehicle for possession or trance, understood as bringing a dancer into direct contact with a spirit or deity, documented in Haitian Vodou and Brazilian Candomble, where possession dance is a recognized part of ritual practice, and in the whirling sema of the Mevlevi Sufi order, founded on the teaching of the thirteenth century poet Rumi, where the turn itself is understood as a form of remembrance.

Comparative and historical study of sacred dance depends heavily on documentation that dance itself does not leave behind on its own: unlike a text, a dance performance survives only through description, depiction or living transmission from teacher to student, so a documented lineage matters more here than in fields with a stable written record. The Mevlevi order's own institutional history, founded shortly after Rumi's death and periodically restricted or banned by later Ottoman and Turkish Republic authorities before official recognition, is unusually well documented for exactly this reason: its practice was repeatedly a matter of state attention, which left records other dance traditions did not generate.

State and colonial authority have shaped the documented history of sacred dance directly, not only through occasional bans. Nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial and reform era Indian authorities associated temple dance with the devadasi system and moved to suppress it; the same period saw a documented revival movement that reconstructed the temple repertoire into the staged classical form known today as Bharatanatyam, a change in institutional setting and audience that scholars studying the form treat as a distinct historical event in its own right, not a simple continuous survival from antiquity.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

A sacred dance entry records a specific, named dance tradition performed as part of religious ritual, devotion or commemoration, its documented origin, the community that performs it and its stated religious purpose, distinct from a performance work in typically being one dance form rather than a full staged dramatic tradition. I. M. Lewis's study of shamanism and spirit possession treats ecstatic and possession dance across many cultures as a documented, recurring religious phenomenon with its own real social structure, trained practitioners, recognized states and a community that interprets what is happening.

An entry records a dance's documented origin and the community or lineage that performs it, its stated religious purpose, invoking possession, marking a rite of passage, honoring an ancestor or deity, and its own actual physical form where that has been documented by observers or practitioners.

Where a sacred dance has drawn documented controversy, over appropriation, over changed performance context, or over its continued practice, an entry records that history honestly as part of the dance's own documented record, alongside and distinct from its stated devotional purpose.