Folk dance is ritual. Dances are performed for holidays, weddings, the agricultural cycle, and to bring people together. I’m going to teach folk dance at an upcoming heathen gathering.

At the dawn of agricultural, newly settled villagers who needed to work together on farm tasks danced together to learn how to move as a unit and co-ordinate with each other, and to build team spirit. Those are also some reasons for military marching. There are folk dances that actually are forms of military drill, such as the vari hasapikos, a Greek men’s dance for a four man team, that teaches how to read a leader’s hand signals and follow them in unison.

Different ethnic groups have different dances, but some dances have spread throughout many countries. One of the dances common to many different nations is the Hora, which began as the Chorus of the sacred theater of ancient Greece. It is a round dance, in which the dancers hold hands and dance in a circle.

Round dances and line dances are the two basic types of folk dance that hark back to agricultural traditions in villages. In Europe, these dances are still performed mostly in the southern and eastern regions. In the western regions, such as in England, round and line dances have largely been supplanted by court dancing styles which are danced in squares or rectangles, and by couple dances. Today, these types of dances are considered country dances, but they supplanted the older round styles when court styles disseminated from the cities. In the northern regions, traditional dance mostly consists of couple dances, but also has some dances that mix round and couple dancing in the A and B parts.

There are also dances still performed in various countries that are meant to be danced as marches or processions, traveling from one place to another. Procession dances and round and line dances are the oldest kinds of folk dance, with court dancing emerging at royal courts in the medieval period, and couple dancing developing after that. (For more info on dance as ritual, see The Dancing Goddesses by Elizabeth Wayland Barber.)   

Image: dancers holding hands in a circle, photo by Erin Lale