People have been dancing since the beginning of human time. We dance for ceremonies, rituals, courtships, celebrations and sheer entertainment. Movement on a large scale has a mysterious, almost divine appeal, a call to hurl oneself into the air. Athletics focus on particular forms of such movement, as do the dances of various cultures and various "schools" of dance. Rhythm is often a driving component of dance and even the relative silence of sport incorporates key internal rhythms.Why do we need to move so large and so metrically?Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, an improbable anthropological couple, did a film in the 1930s called Trance and Dance in Bali. Exploitive and disingenuous perhaps, that film was the forme fruste that abetted birth to the 1960s aesthetic, which married the socially resistant Beaknik generation to the self-exploratory Hippie generation.There immediately followed a true florescence of dance here in the West. Existing modern dance companies, previously half underground, suddenly emerged mainstream while new dance companies evolved. Even such remote dance forms such as the Kathakali dance company from Kerala, India burst on the scene..

"...dance tunes the brain to excel in movement and in rhythmic response."

.Major ballet companies began grand touring and hometown ballet companies emerged as true professional ensembles. Modern dance—once described by Paul Taylor as "ballet but ugly"—also joined in the emergence of dance on everyone's field of play. Dance saturated the stages of the West. Musicals, even operas, incorporated dance as integral to the production.It's as though, being the only mammal to assume a basic upright position, we immediately began to long to go further, to rise into the air. Every deity humans fantasized about took to the air. Even Jesus and Mary and the rest rose to heaven. Angels arrive on wings to bring news or to instill some divine gift. Flight was the dream and dance brought us aerial possibilities. Even when we did take to the air in planes and rockets, the urge to lift off only inspired more dance, more airborne sport, more quests to put our bodies into the air: to defy and conquer gravity.Of course the brain plays a role in the effect of dance on cerebral functioning.  Long-term dance training is associated with brain plasticity in both gray- and white-matter regions associated with motor and auditory functions. Plasticity is an indication of neural re-structuring that expands brain function. In effect, dance tunes the brain to excel in movement and in rhythmic response. The hunger to dance feeds off the experience of both watching and performing dance.This video of superstar ballet dancer Sergei Polunin exemplifies another key aspect of dance: expression. Gesture, mime, the use of the entire body to portray emotion, even to explore the feelings and dynamics of relationships are found in dance. Entire stories are delineated and expressed by movement alone, often with music as an underscoring accompaniment. Comedy and tragedy form some of the greatest dance dramas in the world. Not just such classical ballets such as Swan Lake, but also Japanese Noh theater and Butoh, Indian musical theater, Shen Yun of China, Sub-Saharan and Bantu dances, liturgical dance, and the many middle eastern dance forms. The emotional impact no doubt lies in the vicarious experience conveyed by dance.And that experience is linked to the deeply embedded capacity for empathy. Perhaps the most powerful yet often fragmented and particularized of human emotions, empathy is what guarantees our survival.But compassion is not always equally shared, equally distributed, equally understood.Today, perhaps more than ever, we need a universe of endlessly enduring empathy.