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Folk Dance Federation of California, South, Inc.

Choreogeography:
What is it?
By Richard Duree

World

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Dance forms are distributed across cultures in a complex maze of couple, chain, competetive, and communal dance.

The most interesting question of all is, "Why do people dance the way they do?" The answer to that question is to be found in the study of the relationship of the dance form to the culture and the physical environment in which that culture exists; we call it choreogeogrphy.

Choreogeography includes such things as climate, forms of livelihood, physical geography, foreign invasions, neighbors, and countless other factors of which we can only guess.

In the final analysis, it isn't the answer that's so important as the question – and the quest to answer it.


Used with permission of the author.