G. Stanley Hall: ‘Dancing has great curative power’

In a Boston lecture on March 23, 1904, Clark President G. Stanley Hall espoused the curative power of dancing. The New York Times front page on March 24 featured the following report on the talk, including Hall’s assertion that dancing “brings one near to paradise.”

IF WEARY, TRY DANCING

Dr. G. Stanley Hall Says It Brings One Near to Paradise

Special to The New York Times

BOSTON, March 23—“It is probable that man gets nearer his lost paradise when he is dancing than at any other time.”

These were the words of Dr. G. Stanley Hall of Clark University, Worcester, in a lecture in the Second Church this afternoon. Dr. Hall’s general subject was the “Rhythmic System of the Universe.”

“A philosophy of the universe might be written on rhythm,” he said. “Thus there is a rhythm of years. We get our entire annual growth in a matter of three or four months in the Spring. In the Fall we broaden out. The month has rhythm. At the end of the month we dream more vividly.

“All muscular effort is in rhythm, the action and the reaction, but the climax of all rhythm is dancing — not dancing as it is known now, but dancing as it was done years ago. If a person is tired, he should dance a minuet; if apathetic something faster. 

“Dancing has great curative power. The best thing, the great thing, is health, which means holiness. The best kind of happiness is the happiness of being alive, and that is the spirit of the dance.

“I can’t understand the apathy of some people. Men at fifty, sixty, seventy, and eighty ought to dance when there is dance music. Why, how can they help it?”

Published in The New York Times on March 24, 1904In

Nine months later, on December 30, 1904, the Times reported on Hall’s December 29 address to the Kansas Teachers’ Association in Topeka. Hall “shocked several hundred teachers as he executed a two-step to illustrate the point that dancing trains the body and mind into harmonious relationship.”

The report continued, “Dr. Hall asserted that he would not have a teacher that could not dance. He said it is a high and noble art, and one of the expressions of religion, for ages utilized by the Greeks, Hindus, and other ancient race3s. He said he enjoyed the dance because it aids and strengthens him morally, physically, and mentally.”