The ceremonial dance of the Alaskan Eskimo is a rhythmic
pantomime--the story in gesture and song of the lives of the various
Arctic animals on which they subsist and from whom they believe their
ancient clans are sprung. The dances vary in complexity from the
ordinary social dance, in which all share promiscuously and in which
individual action is subordinated to rhythm, to the pantomime totem
dances performed by especially trained actors who hold their positions
from year to year according to artistic merit.[1] Yet even in the
totem dances the pantomime is subordinate to the rhythm, or rather
superimposed upon it, so that never a gesture or step of the
characteristic native time is lost.
This is a primitive 2-4 beat based on the double roll of the chorus of
drums. Time is kept, in the men's dances, by stamping the foot and
jerking the arm in unison, twice on the right, then twice on the left
side, and so on, alternately. Vigorous dancers vary the program by
leaping and jumping at intervals, and the shamans are noted for the
dizzy circles which they run round the pugyarok, the entrance hole of
the dance hall. The women's dance has the same measure and can be
performed separately or in conjunction with the men's dance, but has a
different and distinctly feminine movement. The feet are kept on the
ground, while the body sways back and forth in graceful undulations to
the music and the hands with outspread palms part the air with the
graceful stroke of a flying gull. Some of their dances are performed
seated. Then they strip to the waist and form one long line of waving
arms and swaying shoulders, all moving in perfect unison.
[1] This characterization applies to the Alaskan Eskimo only; so far
as is now known the other Eskimo branches do not have totemic dances.