Dance is naturally inseparable from the hands and feet, but we can not say that the hands and feet is dance. Because, when people are happy or sad, the action, can not be considered dance, it is just an expression of their feelings of a natural form of dance action. Such as: kicking dance foot rapid changes in the footsteps, Indian dance in the upper body arm movements and eyes up and down, left and right movement, the Korean dance in the shrug and so on. This is processed, there is a certain rhythm for the organic combination, can make people produce a sense of beauty.
What is dance? A British dancer thinks: "Dance is a movement produced by feelings." American dancers think: "Dance is a rhythmic movement of the body." "Dance is a continuous movement of the body in a certain space and with a certain rhythm." According to French dancers, "Dance is a form of habitual or artistic expression of thought and feeling through instinctive or refined movements." According to Japanese dancers, "Dance is the rhythmic movement of the body that exists in time and space."
The Soviet aesthetician defined dance as, "Dance is an art that reveals human thoughts and feelings through artistic images, and the artistic images of dance are composed of rhythmic and organized transformations of human gestures that form a certain system." The mother of modern dance - Duncan believes that "the creative activities against the body movements to express thoughts and feelings, are dance art."
China's modern dramatist Ouyang Yuqian believes: "Dance is to use movement alone to convey feelings, ----- which is expressed by a high degree of emotional concentration.
In simple words, dance is a kind of art of human movement. However, this human movement must be refined, organized and beautified human movement -. In addition, there are many kinds of art belonging to the category of human movement, such as acrobatics, mime, human sculpture, rhythmic gymnastics and so on. Therefore, dance is different from other human movement art is the main aspect: it is to dance movement as the main means of artistic expression, focusing on the expression of language and text or other means of artistic expression is difficult to show people's inner deep spiritual world - delicate emotions, profound ideas, distinctive character, and man and nature, man and society, between man and nature, man and society, as well as conflicts within the human body, to create a vivid dance image that can be perceived by people, in order to express the aesthetic feelings of dance authors (choreographers and dancers), aesthetic ideals, reflecting the aesthetic attributes of life. In addition, due to the human body movements without stopping the flow of the characteristics of change, it must be in a certain manhole (stage or square) and a certain amount of time; and in the dance activities, generally have to have a musical accompaniment, to wear a specific costume, some dance but also to hold a variety of stations, props, if it is performed on the stage, the lights and scenery is also indispensable. So it can also be said that dance is a spatial, temporal and comprehensive dynamic modeling art. In order to understand more clearly the above explanation of the art of dance, we must also do some explanation of some concepts and terms.
Aesthetic emotion: emotion is a reflection of a person's good or bad attitude towards objective things. Can meet or meet the human needs of things, will cause people's positive attitude, so that people produce a positive emotion, such as happy, satisfied, favorite and so on. On the contrary, can not meet the needs of people or things that contradict the needs of people, will cause people's negative attitude, so that people produce a negative emotion, such as dislike, anger, hate and so on. Aesthetic emotion is a kind of high-level human emotion, which is an intuitive reflection of the subjective mental attitude of good and bad produced by the cognition and evaluation of objective aesthetic objects in the process of aesthetics (art creation or art appreciation). Aesthetic emotion plays a very important role in dance creation or dance appreciation, it is the driving force of creative passion, it is the starting point for the pursuit of beauty. If the objective things, can not cause people's aesthetic emotion, dance creation or dance appreciation is very difficult to carry out.
Aesthetic ideal: people in the aesthetic activities, the aspiration and pursuit of the highest, beautiful realm. In real life, people often encounter some false, evil and ugly things, which cause troubles and unhappiness, directly contradicting and conflicting with their pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty. Therefore, people in their subjective imagination, weaving the picture that should be that life. Aesthetic ideal is an important part of social ideal. Art is the concentrated expression of people's aesthetic ideals. We often say that artistic creation comes from the soil of real life, but also to generalize and idealize the life, to shape the ideal image of the characters and the scene of the life that should be.
The aesthetic attributes of life: the analysis and evaluation of the attributes of the reflected phenomenon of a certain social reality in artistic creation, whether it is true, good, beautiful or false, evil and ugly. It is the artist's aesthetic feelings and aesthetic ideals, directly and centrally reflected in artistic creation.