Choreia: The Dance of the Cosmos

Plato looked at the night sky and saw a chorus. In his account of how the world was made, the planets do not simply circle: they dance, drawing level with one another, passing in front and behind, vanishing and coming back into view, the way dancers do in a round. Later writers took the image further. Lucian said dancing began with the creation of the universe, and Plotinus pictured the whole cosmos as a single dancer whose every limb moves because the dance requires it.

The Greek word is choreia, dancing together in time, the root of choreography, chorus and choir. It named the movement of the planets and also a ring of villagers at a festival, and Plato thought these were the same activity at different scales: the gods gave people a sense of rhythm so that they could join the dance, and a person never trained in a chorus was, in his word, uneducated. This article reads the idea in the books that hold it: first the dance of the cosmos, then the human dance that copies it. Every passage links to the page it comes from.

The planets dance

The image starts in Plato's Timaeus, a dialogue about how the world was made. At 40c, after describing the stars as living, divine beings, Timaeus turns to how they move in relation to one another, and the first word of the sentence is χορείας, their dances. The library holds the passage in the first printed edition of Plato in Greek, made by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1513.

χορείας δὲ τούτων αὐτῶν καὶ παραβολὰς ἀλλήλων

But to speak of the dances of these bodies, and their relative passings, and the retrogradations and forward movements of their circles, … and behind whom each is hidden from our sight at certain times, and appearing again …

When Marsilio Ficino put Plato into Latin for the Medici in the fifteenth century he kept the word: Horum uero deorum choreas, “the dances of these gods”.

Read as a dancer, the list is a description of a round dance seen from inside it: dancers draw level with one another, pass in front and behind, disappear behind someone and come back into view, and each returns to the place where it began. R. D. Archer-Hind, editing the Greek in 1888, explained the word in a note.

This is an astronomical term signifying the revolution of the planets around a common centre, as it were in a round dance: see Epinomis 982 E.

R. D. Archer-Hind, note on Timaeus 40c (1888), p. 134 →

The passage he cites is from the Epinomis, a short sequel to the Laws, and it puts the word for dancing three times into one phrase about the stars.

πορείαν δὲ καὶ χορείαν, πάντων χορῶν καλλίστην καὶ μεγαλοπρεπεστάτην χορεύοντα

… to look upon them is most beautiful; and in their course and dance, dancing the most beautiful and magnificent of all dances, they accomplish what is necessary for all living things.

For Plato the stars move in a chorus, in formation, keeping time with each other, and the human chorus, which he describes in the Laws (below), is a small copy of it.

Dance began with the world

Lucian, a Syrian writer of the second century AD who wrote in Greek, took the idea further in his dialogue On the Dance (Of Pantomime in the Fowlers' translation). Crato, a stern philosopher, scolds his friend Lycinus for spending his time at dance performances. Lycinus answers with a history of dancing, and it begins before there were people.

The best antiquarians, let me tell you, trace dancing back to the creation of the universe; it is coeval with that Eros who was the beginning of all things. In the dance of the heavenly bodies, in the complex involutions whereby the planets are brought into harmonious intercourse with the fixed stars, you have an example of that art in its infancy, which, by gradual development, by continual improvements and additions, seems at length to have reached its climax in the subtle harmonious versatility of modern Pantomime.

This is the passage behind most modern statements that the Greeks saw the cosmos as a dance. Lucian puts it in the mouth of an enthusiast arguing with a sceptic, and then moves down to earth. On the next page the Curetes dance in armour, beating their swords on their shields so that the infant Zeus's cries are not heard by his father. Homer's warrior Meriones is praised as a dancer because his footwork let him dodge spears.

The pantomime dancer Lucian admires was a soloist who acted out a whole myth in silence while a chorus sang the words. Lucian's list of what such a dancer has to know is long.

Like Calchas in Homer, the pantomime must know all ‘that is, that was, that shall be’; nothing must escape his ever ready memory. … the intelligibility, in the present case, depending on clearness of gesticulation. … He must know the history of the world, from the time when it first emerged from Chaos down to the days of Egyptian Cleopatra.

The cosmos as one dancer

In the third century AD the philosopher Plotinus turned the image round. He was arguing about astrology: whether the stars cause what happens on earth. His answer, in the fourth Ennead (IV.4.33), is that the universe is a single living being moving as a whole, and that the positions of its parts follow from the movement of the whole, the way a dancer's limbs follow from the dance. A hand is lifted because the figure requires it. A reader who knows the dance can read the rest of the figure from the position of one limb, which is how Plotinus thought astrologers could read events from the stars without the stars causing them. The library holds the passage in a fifteenth-century Greek manuscript; a reader of that copy wrote Elegans comparatio, “an elegant comparison”, in the margin beside it.

the order of things toward one another, being as if in a single, richly varied dance. For in actions, just as in dances, we see the movements of the dance according to each of the motions … If the deliberate choice of the dancer looks toward something else, the parts of the body are affected as a consequence of the dance.

Renaissance readers collected all of this. Cornelius Agrippa, in a book published in 1530 that attacks every art and science in turn, summarises the ancient story of dancing before he condemns it: it came forth, some say, from the movements of the stars, “as if it were a certain harmonious choreography of the heavens”, in the Latin tanquam harmonica quadam cælestium choræa, and was used in worship by the Curetes, the Brahmins, the Egyptians and the Salian priests of Rome.

tanquam harmonica quadam cælestium choræa, vna cum mundi generatione diuinitus prodijsse dicunt

… from the movements of the stars and constellations, and their advance and retreat, conjunction, and order (as if it were a certain harmonious choreography of the heavens) proceeded divinely along with the creation of the world.

The copy on earth

If the stars move as a chorus, every chorus on earth is a small model of the heavens. The oldest description of one is in the Iliad. In book 18 the smith-god Hephaestus makes a shield for Achilles and covers it with scenes of ordinary life. In the vineyard the harvesters dance as they carry the grapes, and at the end of the series he makes a dancing-floor. The Greek line, in the Aldine edition printed in Venice in 1517, reads ἐν δὲ χορὸν ποίκιλλε, “and on it he worked a choros”. In the lines that follow, the choros is both the floor and the young men and women who dance on it.

In their midst, a boy played a sweet song on a clear-toned lyre, and sang beautifully of Linus with a delicate voice; they, beating the ground in time, followed with song and shouting, dancing with their feet. … The famous Amphigyeis wrought a dancing-floor similar to the one that once in wide Knossos the skillful Daedalus made for the fair-haired Ariadne.

Homer, Iliad 18, Aldine edition (Venice, 1517), p. 211 →

The dancers in this scene follow a musician, keep time with their feet, and sing while they move. That combination of music, voice and footwork is what the later writers mean by choreia. The dancing-floor Daedalus built for Ariadne at Knossos was a famous object in its own right. Pausanias, who travelled Greece in the second century AD, says the people of Knossos still had “the dancing-floor of Ariadne, which Homer mentioned in the Iliad, made of white stone”.

Joining the gods' dance

Plato explains why people dance at all in the second book of the Laws, his last dialogue. An Athenian stranger is talking with a Cretan and a Spartan about how to educate citizens. He starts from something anyone can watch: young animals and children cannot keep still. What distinguishes people, he says, is that they can feel order in their movement.

ὁ μὲν ἀπαίδευτος ἀχόρευτος ἡμῖν ἔσται

But to us, the gods whom we said were given as our fellow-dancers are also the ones who have bestowed the perception of rhythm and harmony along with pleasure, by which they move us and lead us in chorus, stringing us together with songs and dances; and they have named them “choruses” from the word for the joy that is innate. … Therefore, the uneducated man will be for us the one who is “unchoral,” and the one who has been sufficiently educated must be deemed one who has danced well.

Plato connects choros with chara, joy. The derivation is wrong, as modern dictionaries show, but it tells you how Plato thought of the thing. His word for the uneducated is ἀχόρευτος, “unchoral”. In the next line the Athenian defines the art: χορεία is ὄρχησίς τε καὶ ᾠδή, dancing and singing together.

A few pages later he names what the two halves share.

χορεία δέ που ξυναμφότερον κληθείη

And for the order of movement, “rhythm” would be the name; and for the order of the voice, of the high and low mingled together, “harmony” would be the term; and the two together would be called “dance.” And we said that the gods, taking pity on us, gave us Apollo and the Muses as fellow-dancers and chorus-leaders.

For Plato a chorus also showed character. On the next page of the Laws he says that a brave person and a coward in the same trouble will not move or sing alike, and that the figures and melodies of a good soul can be told from those of a bad one. That is why he treats training in the chorus as the whole of early education, and why the Laws spends pages deciding which dances a city should allow.

Movement, figure, pointing

The clearest technical account comes from Plutarch, more than four centuries after Plato. His Table Talk records conversations at dinner parties, and in book IX, question 15, the guests are judging a dance competition. Many of the dancers are dancing “more eagerly than musically”, and someone asks what the dance teachers mean by the word phora. Ammonius answers by dividing a dance into three parts.

Ὅτι τρία μέρη τῆς ὀρχήσεως, φορὰ καὶ σχῆμα καὶ δεῖξις

That there are three parts of dancing: movement, posture, and demonstration; what each of them is, and what is common to poetry and the dance.

A dance, he says on the next page, is made of movements and positions, “just as melody is composed of notes and intervals; here, the pauses are the limits of the movements.” The phora is the movement. The schēma is the position the movement ends in, “when, having posed the figure of Apollo or Pan or some Bacchante upon the body, they remain graphically in those forms”: the dancer arrives, holds a recognisable shape for a moment, and the audience sees a god or a character. The third part, deixis, does not imitate anything. It points: the dancer shows “the earth, the heaven, the people themselves standing nearby”. The red chalk drawing at the top of this page shows a dancer in the kind of held figure Plutarch describes, with two fauns of Pan's company.

Put in a rehearsal room's terms, phora is the transition, schēma is the shape you hit on the count, and deixis is a gesture whose meaning is outside your body. The words are the astronomers' too: phora is the motion of a planet, and schēma its configuration with the others at a given moment. Plutarch then compares the whole to poetry.

In short, he said he would transfer the dictum of Simonides from painting to dance: for dance is silent poetry, and poetry is, in turn, speaking dance. … It would seem that, as in painting, the poems resemble the colors, and the dances resemble the lines by which the forms are defined.

The three parts had a long afterlife. When the physician Girolamo Mercuriale wrote his book on the ancient art of physical exercise, De arte gymnastica (first published in 1569), he took Plutarch's division over into Latin as latio, figura and indicatio, and added Plutarch's complaint that dance had since been corrupted.

lationem, figuram, & indicationem

Plutarch, the most clear of all after Aristotle, expressed in book IX of his Symposiacs, where he wrote that dance had three parts: lation, figure, and indication; because it consisted entirely of motions, postures, and rest, just as harmony consists of tones and intervals.

Chorea without order

The Latin spelling, chorea, has a second history. In the late Middle Ages outbreaks of compulsive dancing were called Saint Vitus' dance or Saint John's dance, after the saints who were prayed to for a cure. Paracelsus, the Swiss physician, rejected the idea that saints send illnesses and gave the condition a Latin name instead.

sondern es ist billich zu nennen Chorea lasciua

So we do not want to change the names because of the recognition of the saints, but it is proper to call it Chorea lasciua, for reasons as follows hereafter … So the cause of the sickness Chorea lasciua is solely an æstimatio and an assumed imaginatio.

Paracelsus thought the dancing came from imagination, or from what the sufferer had seen and heard. In 1686 the English physician Thomas Sydenham used the name for a different condition, the jerking movements that follow a childhood infection, now called Sydenham's chorea. Huntington's chorea was named in 1872. In medicine today, chorea means involuntary, irregular movement, movement with no order and no intention behind it: the word for the ordered dance of the planets, turned into a name for its opposite.

Six words

For reference, the words the sources use. Most are still heard in dance studios in some form.

χορός choros

The group of dancers, and also the place where they dance. Homer uses the same word for both.

χορεία choreia

What the choros does: dancing and singing together. Latin writers spelled it chorea.

ὄρχησις orchēsis

Dancing as such, the body's part of the art. The orchestra of a Greek theatre was the dancing-floor in front of the stage.

φορά phora

Movement: the travel of the body from one position to the next.

σχῆμα schēma

Figure: the position a movement arrives at and holds, a pose. The same word is used for the arrangement of the planets at a given moment.

δεῖξις deixis

Pointing: a gesture that shows a thing directly, the sky, the ground, a person standing nearby.

The Fowlers' Lucian and Archer-Hind's note are quoted in their printed English. The other quotations, Plato's Greek among them, are the library's translations, copied from the pages they link to. The Plotinus manuscript is hard to read and its transcription has gaps, so it is quoted briefly and the argument is summarised from the standard text of Enneads IV.4.33. The dates for Sydenham and Huntington are cited from outside the library. The cosmic dance is sometimes credited to Aristotle, but the passages are Plato's, Lucian's and Plotinus's; Aristotle, in On the Heavens II.9, rejected the idea that the moving stars make music.