Dance is broadly conceived as physical movement organized into patterns
in time and space. Writings on dance grounded in the European
intellectual tradition have tended to distinguish dance from other
systems of organized movement (such as sport, military drills,
synchronized labor, festival processions, and sometimes ritual) by
identifying a dimension of conscious craft or artistry. The discipline
of anthropology has shown that this distinction is not universal by
investigating how organized human movement functions in different
cultures, as well as how it relates to music, theater, pantomime,
storytelling, and other kinds of performative behavior.
