Ancient Egyptian dance is performed at yearly festivals, where priests and lay persons reenact the death of Osiris. Severely angular and linear, Egyptian dance combines music and story. These festival dances are both entertainment and participatory in nature.
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-3000 Primitive Origins of Drama
The earliest elements of drama are thought to have evolved from fertility dances when the harvest was ended and the cycle of life about to be renewed. These rites, growing out of the magic ritual of a semi-civilized village society, began with the dance and invocation that celebrate and illustrate the desire and pursuit of fecundity. Out of this developed an obscure production called a "Dithyramb," a choric song accompanied by ritual movement or dance, of which no early example survives. Scholars are still uncertain as to how Athenian drama and Tragedy grew out of the Dithyramb.
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-3000 Dionysus, Greek God of Drama
Primitive drama, the song and dance at the harvest, may have at first been religious ritual in honor of Demeter, the corn goddess of an earlier matriarchal culture, but the Dithyramb also celebrates Dionysus. Dionysus aka Bacchus, the god that brought the gift of wine to mankind, is the patron god of this early ecstatic drama; the earliest plays are concerned with some incident in the legend of Dionysus himself, and his wanderings over the earth with the mythical goat-legged satyrs and the nymphs.
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-1000s Get Back, All the Way Back
Griots serve as living history books and newspapers. These singers and musicians in the savannah belt of Africa, also known as praise singers, must know traditional songs, current events, and local history as well as being clever and quick-witted enough to incorporate chance incidents, gossip and social satire into their songs. Hip Hop and protest rappers find their ancestry in the song of the Griots.
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-495 Sophocles, Playwright and Statesman
Sophocles is born into a family of high social position. As a schoolboy he is already famous for his beauty, and wins prizes in athletics, music and literature. At 27 he begins his dramatic career in the public eye when he defeats Aeschylus in the Dionysia, the annual dramatic festival of Athens. One of the three great tragic dramatists of ancient Greece, he writes 123 plays and wins 24 victories in Dionysia. Of these, only 7 are preserved in full. Sophocles enjoys the friendship of such leading political and intellectual figures as Pericles and Herodotus. He serves an active public life as treasurer of subject Athenian allies, as general during the Samian revolt and the Peloponnesian War, and is one of ten commissioners who govern Athens after the disastrous Sicilian expedition.
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-400 Ancient Indian Dance
The dance of ancient India is so complex that not only are there explicit instructions for the movement of hands, limbs and torso but for glances as well, since these movements express both emotions and thoughts. Originally religious ceremonies, these dances require rigorous training. Kathakali is a dance of Hindu mythology, Kathak is a rhythmic dance with foot tapping, and Manipurni is an acrobatic dance.
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-400 Ancient Flamenco
A style of dance created in Andalusia, Spain is performed throughout the ancient world as its performers tour Imperial Rome. This marks the beginning of the dance known as flamenco.
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-180s Plautus Comic Influence
Plautus writes in the style of Greek New Comedy. His clownish, witty comedies blend farce, music and dance. His work exercises an abiding influence on the development of comedy and romantic drama in the west from the Renaissance to the present. His "Amphityron" will form the basis of Giradoux's "Amphityron 38," his "Aulularia" the basis of Moliere's "L'Avare."
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450 Foreign Dance and Music Enter Japan
The first foreign dance and music to enter Japan come from three ancient kingdoms of the Korean peninsula: Paekche, Silla and Koguryo. Included is the "gigaku" dance, introduced by the Paekche musician, Mimashi. Used to accompany Buddhist rituals, these arts quickly become established in Japan.
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1780s Aboriginal Tales
Western emigrants to Australia stumble across a long oral tradition of Aboriginal songs and tales that celebrate the mythical Dreamtime, a time when all things were created. Song poetry ranges from the verses of Central Australia and the Western Desert to elaborate song-cycles of Arnhem Land, which use complex symbolic imagery and allusion.
