The Relationship between Play and Dance

My theoretical starting point is children's play and I examine the meeting between dance and the aesthetics of play, i.e. its poetic and epic patterns. Vygotsky (1995) argues that children's creativity in its original form is syncretistic creativity, which means that the individual arts have yet to be separated and specialized. In my thesis 'The Aesthetics of Play' (1995) I found two aesthetic patterns: a lyrical and musical pattern and a dramatic and literary pattern of play. The aim of the study has been to examine the relationship between dance and play and the possibilities for dance to be meaningful to children. I have analysed dance education for children (6-8 years old) in five towns, according to two theories of dance education: that of Rudolf Laban as represented at the National College of Dance in Sweden and that of the Swedish dance teachers Eva and Cecilia Dahlgren. The results show that there is a relationship between play and dance, as young children are interested in the fiction and in characterizing figures, roles and actions. However, most of the dance lessons from the five towns in Sweden dealt with movement-training in relation to music, and dance was not a dramatic subject using the fiction from children's play.