Dance Ethnography

The definition and importance of entertainment in human being system are controversy and they are depend on the matter of debate; nevertheless, it is obvious that entertainment is one of the basic psychological needs of human being beside water, food and shelter. Everyone enjoys a breathtaking performance or their favorite TV show after a hustle week or even after a long day at work/ school. It evidently has a close knit relationship with communication but there is one major aspect of entertainment that hardly anyone would notice the obvious communicational factors in it which is choreography and dancing, especially in traditional dances. In fact, when considering from communication perspective, it’s surprising and fascinating how much communication,

First of all, choreography itself is "the art of planning a series of dance steps for a group of dancers to perform to a piece of music" (MacMillan). In other words, it’s a set of body movement and gesture combined with the movement of the performer’s face in the purpose of presenting certain meaning or just for entertainment. It is considered as more academic than dancing since there are schools for it where people can learn a certain type of performing choreography such as ballet. Moreover, the purpose of a choreography performance most of the time is telling a story instead of just showing the performers technical skills anymore. Dancing, on the other hand, is defined as “to move your feet and your body in a pattern of movements that follows the sound of music” (MacMillan). This means that whenever we move our whole body along with a piece of music is also considered as dancing. Dancing, in a way, is way more informal than choreography since it usually does not required any strict guideline or certain steps that dancers have to follow; dancer can always modify the structure or the movements of the dance if necessary, or even if they wanted to. It is more about gathering a number of people having fun together under the same music. However, dancing can also express a historical story or legend in certain

Frank (669) mention that nonverbal communication aka body language is using the combination of gestures and body movement, of human being in particular, to communicate with others. We as humankind use this “language” as a way to communicate and express our emotions. With that being said, we can clearly see the connection between choreography and/or dancing and nonverbal communication because of its basic essence in combination between facial expression and the movement of body. For example, if a performance missing facial expression, it would not be consider as a success performance and the performer would be considered as amateur even since it does not clearly express to the audience how the main characters feels and what obstacle that he/she encounters. This will create a massive decrease in the interest of the audience as well as the real structure and meaning behind that