Trends into the 21st century

Supporting nationalism

Folk dances and their association with national identity have made them vehicles for government propaganda. In Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, the government used charming folk dances to embody the mystique of an idyllic Germany. These folk dances were expected to engender loyalty and the kind of national pride that served the ideology of the Third Reich; Germans were to be knit into a unified and supposedly superior “race,” in part through such activities.

Folk dances were pulled from their normal contexts to become national symbols to the outside world in the years after World War II, especially in communist countries. Gifted dancers were selected and professionally trained to perform theatrically enhanced and decontextualized folk dances. The resulting “folk dance” troupes would tour the world as evidence of the success of their governments in unifying their countries and earning the support of the “folk.” Most of these companies represented eastern European nations, including Romania, Bulgaria, the former Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), and the former Yugoslavia (now Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, Slovenia, and Kosovo). Similarly, certain governments—for example, those of North Korea and China—have used dance in mass performances to symbolize the people’s support of their political systems.

Fostering goodwill and making a profit

Not all ethnic and national performances are ideological in nature. The United Nations encouraged cultural exchange as a means of fostering goodwill between countries. Cultural touring includes folk troupes, among others; to represent folk dance, the United States has supported a group from Berea, Kentucky, for example.

National, state, and local tourist agencies have gone beyond ambassadorship and have discovered the value of dances and dance troupes that are identified as their own. Visitors can be entertained, absorb some local culture, and support the economy. Around the world, from Mongolia to the remotest islands, dances are polished, choreographed, packaged, and presented as authentic.

Dancing for enlightenment

Two late 20th-century phenomena use folk dances as a medium to achieve idealistic ends. The two are Circle Dances and Dances of Universal Peace. The organizations have similar goals, but their histories differ and they are not connected.

The Circle Dance phenomenon was developed by the German dancer Bernard Wosien, who encountered circle-type folk dances in his European travels and was impressed with the spirituality they inspired in him. He found an established spiritual and ecological community at Findhorn, Scotland, and joined the group in 1976. More dance groups formed in Scotland and England and spread from there. The repertory grew with the number of teachers. The dances became known by several names, including world dances, circle dances, or the original sacred circle dances. Circles are unbroken, and dancers move as one; these characteristics became part of a view of the act of doing the dances as a meditative or spiritual experience. The phenomenon has spread in person and on the Internet; the dances are relatively simple to learn and teach. Laura Shannon, a dancer, teacher, and writer who lived in Findhorn, was instrumental in spreading the movement; she was especially interested in the dances of Armenia, Greece, and the Balkans.

The Dances of Universal Peace were developed by Samuel Lewis from California, who was a Sufi and Zen master. He had been a student of modern dance pioneer Ruth St. Denis, who inspired him with her understanding of dance as a means to attain wisdom. In the late 1960s, he and some followers began performing folk dances as a spiritual practice, and soon the movement gained momentum. Lewis died in 1971, but his foundation continued to draw on many of the world’s mystical and religious traditions. The more than 500 dances in the repertory are accompanied by lyrics representing the various sacred foundations of the dances. Members carry their dances to many countries in their quest to encourage peace and intercultural harmony.

Who owns the dance?

In the 21st century, questions of ownership have reached far into the practice of music and dance. Several Native American groups and the Republic of Croatia, for example, have insisted that traditional arts should have the protection of copyright, so that they could gain recognition and control how performances would be used. Performing groups and organizations in Great Britain resisted laws that would require the licensing of all music, live or recorded, used for dance. Similarly, the U.S. Congress was considering questions of the ownership and copyright of intangible assets in the United States. In folk music and folk dance, which were long considered to be anonymously created and commonly owned—that is, in the public domain—challenges to the status quo became more common. Groups were claiming to be the “folk” and asserting rights. Once again, questions of authenticity and provenance arose, and dancers and scholars had to reexamine their definitions of folk dance and folk dancers. The United Nations has been working on the matter from several directions: In 2003 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) adopted the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage to establish an approach to the preservation and protection of nonmaterial cultural properties such as dance, language, ritual, and craftsmanship, and in the first decade of the 21st century the World Intellectual Property Organization of the UN actively worked to establish how property rights extended to traditional knowledge.