WordNet
n. a dance that is part of a religious ritual [syn: ritual dancing, ritual dance]
Wikipedia
Ceremonial dance is a major category or classification of dance forms or dance styles, where the purpose is ceremonial or ritualistic.
This compares to other major dance categories based on purpose:
- Competitive dance - Erotic dance - Participation dance - Performance dance - Social dance- Celebration dance
- Festival dance
- Dance in ancient cultures
- Ancient Greece
- Ancient Rome
- Classical Indian dances
- Ritual dance, Magic/Mystic/Spiritual dance
- Abbots Bromley Horn Dance
- Some Basque dances
- Căluşari
- Circle dance
- Corroborree
- Dances of Universal Peace
- Long Sword dance
- Morris dance
- Rapper dance
- Religious dance
- Ritual dances of China
- Ritual dances of India
- Sema, or Whirling dervish dance
- War dance
- Weapon dance
Usage examples of "ceremonial dance".
But he was even more fascinated by the human spectacle taking place before his eyes, this ceremonial dance performed by his pupil to welcome the morning and the sun.
Two lines of adolescent girls appear, one line advancing in measured ceremonial dance steps around each side of the altar.
Half gliding, half floating in the air, the white-clad bog-wraiths were slowly retreating toward the still waters and the island ruin in fantastic formations suggesting some ancient and solemn ceremonial dance.
In the village, where scores of tall torches had been set out around the compound, more than three hundred Sea Folk were engaged in a ceremonial dance around the two child-victims pegged out in the mud, singing in their deep voices and playing upon simple instruments.
At other times however the evolutions of the ceremonial dance, with its feigned advances and feigned withdrawals, its ritual offerings and symbolic motions, are protracted beyond measure, lasting perhaps for years before the right true end is reached.
Peace, joy, justice, love, each without loss of the others, engaged in some intricate and ceremonial dance.
Below her, the apes had started their ceremonial dance, the ludicrous enough to the uninformed, but a dance that would strike terror, and did, to any normal jungle denizen.
The hardest part of his impromptu striptease was kicking free of his lace-up running shoes and yanking off the socks beneath, but he managed to do so and to make it look like part of a ceremonial dance step.
He said only that one had come to the coven on the night of its ceremonial dance, a woman like a living statue, and she had walked through the fire to show that it was useless against her.
It had elements both of a savage struggle -- a fierce, life-and-death fight -- and of a ceremonial dance with beasts.