In its traditional ethnic-cultural form, it is the most immediate physical mode of participation and contribution to the rhythmic patterns of a cultural tradition. The patterning of the bodily movement is facilitated most readily with percussion, but often is also embellished with culturally symbolic art forms, music and language. It is itself a language which can facilitate social interactions and can sustain tradition and myth especially if there is no technology of written records. Dance is a cultural phenomena which perpetuates the stories and traditions and attitudes across the generations, by establishing memories of movement, rhythm, music and costumery in the minds of the individuals.

It is a powerfully cohesive activity. It has the capability of uniting an audience in a theatre of entertainment. It can invoke culturally oriented imaginings of deities supposed to be able to influence the chaos of nature. It can induce a heightened collective commitment to the lethal objectives of war.

Like any other human endeavour activity however, dance forms have been refined and complexified. They have been made dependent upon a variety of extreme physical capacities, so that participation in a complicated choreography is denied to most of a population. For most, it has become no more than a visual and aural spectacle. For the general populace, it has become a physically enformed interpretation of music and complex rhythms generated for public performance, display and profit.

At an individual level however, like any art form, dance can always function as a medium of self-expression and escape from reality... in spite of the attempts to transform it into a competitive sport. In cultures where dance for the general populace no longer functions as reinforcing any sort of social solidarity, two elements of dance , that of therapeutic exercise and the simulation of copulation, are the participation residue. In this context, dance has become either a compensatory exercise for the obese and the sedentary, or a drug sustained display of sexual provocation.