The Posture Fossil Record In Every Traditional Dance

With National Dance Day coming up, we Gokhale Method teachers find ourselves thinking less about dance as art or exercise than as evidence of our universal human blueprint. However different the language, costume, or climate, traditional dances the world over share the same underlying body architecture. They represent a living fossil record of the way we humans are meant to move — not just in dance, but in everyday life.

Many rhythms, one design

I have enjoyed the great privilege of traveling to many parts of the world where chronic back pain is, by local accounts, almost unheard of. Along the way, I have also been a guest at several celebrations involving dance: Carnivale in Rio, traditional Indian weddings, and an outdoor disco in Burkina Faso, among others.

The dances I saw — and often joined in — had different rhythms, moves, histories, and styles. Yet beneath all that variation, the bodies performing them shared an unmistakable common architecture.

Certain features kept recurring: externally rotated arms and legs, shoulders positioned well back, an anteverted pelvis, and a straight lumbar spine. These were not isolated “techniques” or stylistic flourishes the dancers had been taught to perform. They were simply part of a movement vocabulary embedded in the way people used their bodies, passed kinesthetically from one generation to the next.

I observed this man dancing in Brazil. Note his externally rotated arms, shoulders positioned well back, an anteverted pelvis, and anchored rib cage.

I took this photo in a small village in Orissa in India, where these girls displayed beautiful “J-spines”.

Modern industrialized living has eroded much of this vocabulary from the way we stand, sit, walk, and bend in everyday life. Traditional dance, however, still preserves many of these natural movement patterns — giving us an opportunity to rediscover them.

As a young adult, I adopted natural healthy posture during dance classes or performances, but then returned to swaying my back when the costume came off. These days, I translate my muscle memory from dance to everyday tasks like working at the kitchen bench. 

If you'd like to see some of this for yourself, I'm hosting two free online workshops for National Dance Day. We’ll look at what traditional dances from around the world can teach us about the way the human body is designed to move — and explore how those same patterns can help us move with greater ease and less pain in everyday life.

I hope you’ll join me.

Best next step

Sign up for our free National Dance Day workshops. Alumni have received their invitations via email. Beginners can register by clicking the image below: