Article by Dr Tom Corcoran. Photographs by Sebastian Rich
Published by ETHNOMAD
At a wedding in Jaipur, I asked a friend about his father, Yogendra. "Why is he not dancing when everyone else is?"
He laughed and said, “People can be dancing all around him, and he will never lift a limb.”
For eighty-six years, Yogendra had remained an island of stillness inside the lively rhythms of Indian family life. Weddings, festivals, gatherings of cousins and neighbours, music spilling into courtyards late into the night and even at the school in which he had run for decades. The entire household might be clapping, stamping and spinning in circles. Yogendra would sit quietly in a chair, smiling.
Watching him, I began to suspect something important. Dance is not always about movement. Sometimes it is simply about rhythm. Some people express it with their bodies. Others carry it somewhere deeper.
Across the world, dance appears in countless forms, yet the instinct behind it is strikingly similar. In Ireland, the céilí draws entire communities into motion, arms linked as fiddles and accordions push the tempo faster and faster. In Argentina, the tango unfolds through tension and intimacy, two bodies negotiating space with precision. Across Africa, dance merges with drums and song, where movement carries stories of ancestors, harvests and spirits. Today, the same impulse reappears on city streets and in the endless choreography circulating across social media.
In India, dance is inseparable from storytelling. Bollywood transforms it into a spectacle, using colour, gesture and rhythm to carry emotion across the screen. Photographer Sebastian Rich discovered while documenting some of these traditions that even the person behind the camera must become part of the choreography. To follow dancers properly, the cameraman must move with them, anticipating the rhythm before it breaks.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once asked a curious question.
“Where are the books that teach us to dance?”
His question hints at something deeper. Much of human knowledge was never written down. It lived in bodies.
Long before language found its way onto paper, people communicated through movement. Ceremonial dances marked births, harvests and seasonal change. Ritual dances carried healing, grief and celebration. Movement itself was memory.
During my travels, I have seen these traditions persist even in places where almost everything else has been lost. In refugee settlements in Burundi, the thunder of drums still gathers people into circles of dance. Among Rohingya communities displaced from Myanmar, moments of music and movement briefly restore a sense of home. In Syrian camps, young men sometimes form spontaneous dabke lines, stamping the ground in unison while older men clap the rhythm.
One evening in a Burundian refugee settlement in western Tanzania, I watched the process unfold. The first drumbeats began slowly somewhere in the camp, deep and hollow, echoing across the dusty ground. A small crowd gathered almost without noticing. Then a group of young girls stepped into the open space and began to move, shoulders rolling, feet striking the earth in sharp bursts of rhythm. The tempo quickened. More dancers joined. Dust lifted in the warm evening air as the circle tightened and the drums grew louder. For a few minutes, the camp was transformed. Not a place of exile, but a village again.
These are not performances for tourists. They are acts of cultural survival.
Dance rarely belongs only to the stage. Even in the most unexpected places, the body remembers its language. A ballerina moves through a concrete parking structure, proof that rhythm and expression travel wherever people do.
Dance takes many forms. In modern cities, pole dancers combine strength, balance, and artistry, continuing the long human tradition of telling stories through movement.
Institutions such as UNESCO now recognise dance as part of the world’s intangible cultural heritage. Yet recognition alone does not protect these traditions. Conflict, displacement and economic change can strip away the social environments in which dances live and evolve.
Tourism introduces another tension. In some places, dance traditions are reshaped to meet audience expectations. Certain movements are labelled authentic while others fade from view. Yet culture rarely stands still. Dance, like language, changes with each generation.
Artists have long tried to capture movement in other forms. Henri Matisse painted the swirling bodies of Dance in 1910. In Australia, the Aboriginal leader William Barak painted a corroboree ceremony in 1897, attempting to preserve in pigment what normally exists only in motion.
But dance ultimately belongs to the body.
In societies where written records tell only part of the story, movement continues to carry memory. It holds knowledge about community, identity and belonging that cannot easily be translated into words.
Within every dance there is a story.
And when the rhythm begins, and someone invites you to join, remember that you are stepping into one of the oldest human traditions.
You may leap into the circle with the others.
Or you may follow Yogendra’s quiet example.
Sitting calmly in the corner of a crowded Jaipur courtyard, he simply smiles as the music rises around him.
“I am already dancing.”
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