WHATEVER the nature of dance," the critic Curt Sachs once wrote, "it needs no onlooker, not even a single witness. Nevertheless, in spite of its ecstatic and liturgical character, there early appears the germ of that great process of change which has gradually transformed the dance from an involuntary motor discharge, and a ceremonial rite, into a work of art conscious of and intended for observation."
It is also likely that the momentum which brought about the transformation of ritual into a form intended for spectators stemmed from the religious necessity for correctness in ritual acts. In the New Hebrides, any dancer making a mistake was assaulted, wounded, and possibly killed by bowmen posted to keep careful watch for inaccuracies in rituals. By the time the cultures of Egypt and the Far East arose, ritual had been replaced in many regions by ceremony.
Ceremony was a highly planned, structured, and precise form which demanded the instruction of priests in order to faithfully adhere to tradition. Every error decreased the power and efficacy of the ceremonial act. Exactitude and formality, rather than spontaneity and expressiveness, became the premise of this newly evolved ceremonial activity. Of course, the process was not abrupt: rituals had always possessed some degree of formality. By using the term "ceremony," however, I am describing the transition from participation by a tribe in ritualistic expression to the ceremonial formality of a priestly caste, which tended to exclude the impulse that had originally given rise to ritual. If it were not for the ever-refining preoccupation of religion and the traditions of its exclusive and secretive priest caste, dance might have remained a purely expressional phenomenon — a complex extension of animal impulses. We shall never know.