The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space.

The only information we have about the early history of the dance comes to us from the rock paintings created by primitive man tens of thousands of years ago in what is now France.

In the earliest cultures any tie between the dancers is slight. In a higher level the choral dancers almost always touch one another and thus force themselves into the same stride and the same movement. The closer the contact, the stronger is the social character of the choral.

If you ask an Auin Bushman what realty happens at the puberty ceremonials, he will tell you, "We dance." In the initiation customs of all peoples the dances play an especially important part. The dance is the center of wedding festivities.

Rhythmic motion has become the carrier and creator of almost every ecstatic mood of any significance in human life.

The adult who puts his arm around his companion in the ballroom, and the child in the roadway, skipping in a round dance - they forget themselve, they dissolve the weight of earthly contact and the rigidity of daily existence. The soul slips into a twilight stage.

Whatever the nature of dance, it needs no onlooker, not even a single witness.