How do dance and math relate?

How do dance and math relate?
Dance and math are related through time and in space. Whenever you dance, you are experiencing time and space and their proportional relationship.

Dance movement can be all sorts of combinations of circles and lines--geometry!!!--and our bodies move through space in arcs and circles. So there are plenty of ways that we can physically experience (or watch) geometry. One person dancing can use their body to create shape, or they can move across a floor in a particular pattern (line or circle, for example). And when you add more dancers, the possible relationships are endless: remember lines that are tangents to circles? It's easy to imagine two dancers creating those shapes, or moving in those patterns through a room.

Even more, we can physically experience AMOUNTS of time, and those amounts can be added, divided, and multiplied. You can do a movement that takes 3 pulses, then add a movement that takes 2 pulses; you can repeat a 3 pulse pattern 3 times, to make 9; two dancers could dance a 12 count phrase, with one dancer repeating a 3 count movement 4 times, and one repeating a 4 count movement 3 times.

And of course, dance can divide space. Imagine two dancers moving across a room in a straight line: one takes 7 very large steps, and one takes 14 steps, each half as long. Then one wild character might cover the same space in 56 teeny-tiny steps, followed by a leaper eating up the space in 3 and a half!

One person can dance all of those relationships alone, or they could decide not to make any patterns at all; but as soon as you add another dancer, there's a relationship created that could be described by numerical, or geometrical, concepts.


Also, I sometimes visualize the problem solving of math on a sheet of paper, particularly algebra, as a dance itself. There is something rhythmic about it. Subtracting/ adding/ multiplying/ dividing from side to side is like a dance- one step after the next forms a dance arrangement.