Prehistoric iconography and dance: preliminary observations

Abstract

The oldest documentation on the dance consists of images produced with various techniques on a wide range of material supports (rock, ceramic, metal). Due to the nature of the document, in the search for the origins of the dance, the choreutic competence must proceed to the iconographic. The figurative language of prehistoric images is highly formalized, and expresses the limits imposed by the ritual to the rules of communication. Moreover, precisely to the value attributed to the sacral support, to represent an action, as a dance, rather than plowing, or something else, means to activate a mechanism that perpetually produces the effects for which the representation was produced. This mechanism reveals that there is a strong relationship between the representations of prehistoric dance and the cosmological context.