From the first kick of a baby's foot to the last "Anniversary Waltz," we dance—to internal rhythms and external sounds. Before the written word, humans spoke the language of dance. It's as ancient as the 3,400-year-old image of a man with a lute, dancing on a clay plaque discovered in northern Israel.
We dance, not just with our bodies, but from the heart. "Dance is bodies sounding off," says Judith Lynne Hanna, an anthropologist at the University of Maryland. We pour out love and hate, joy and sorrow; appeal to the spirits, gods, and nature; flirt, seduce, court; celebrate birth, death, and everything in between. We even presume to reorder the world, as if, in the Shaker song, by "turning, turning we come round right." Dance is so profane, some religions ban it; so sacred, others claim it.