According to the website of the American Dance Institute, there has only been dance “for as much as 10,000 years.”
In the first place, the origins of the modern style of dancing were in Japan. The style of dance then began in Japan in 1505 by kendo kata (the Japanese system of kata) and eventually made its way to the U.S. as a result of the missionaries of the time who were trying to get more people to come to the new world. But how did this style of dance come to the U.S. and other countries in the western world?
The most likely origin for the modern dance has more to do with the people that had been there before they became dancers. In Japan, they’d been performing dance for hundreds of years, and when the Japanese missionaries arrived they brought dances with them, like kendo, which the Japanese believed to be part of the ancient Chinese martial arts called Shinto, so it had to be accepted to them. Other dances, like kasudan, which was very much like English soccer (think of the goal or goalposts as the players) were accepted by many Japanese people who were very comfortable with them, too.
Now, the main part of the story is that as those dances made their way to America, they were brought into it from Japan. However, this idea seems to be very much in conflict with what we know about dance from the time period itself.
For example, according to the American Dance Institute:
“By 1610, Japan had conquered most of Europe, but the French and British had already taken an interest in the martial arts. They started to teach their people kendo (japanese style of martial arts), kasudan (traditional Chinese martial arts), and tai chi (traditional Chinese martial arts). Around the same time, a group of German immigrants came to America. In the 1560s, a group of German immigrants and a Dutch-Japanese group came aboard the “Shakespeare” ship. They brought with them a new style of dance: the German gekokan, the Japanese tai chi, and the English soccer.”
However, to me that does not seem like it has much to do with dancing. There was a long-standing tradition in Japan of using instruments in kendo. Many of these instruments had to do with playing tai chi, or some version of it. In the beginning, kendo was done without instruments, but
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