Anarchology of Art (2/5): “Dance” as Repressed Rebellion and the Discourse of Silent Protest

Anarchology of Art (2/5): 

“Dance” as Repressed Rebellion and the Discourse of Silent Protest

✍️ Mahmoud Sadeghi Janbehan

Translated and edited with the assistance of ChatGPT

Dance and the Logic of Emotional Rebellion

Abstract

This paper explores dance from the perspective of Art Anarchology, interpreting it as a specific manifestation of repressed rebellion and a silent discourse of protest. In this view, dance emerges as an unconscious and profound response to the blockage of the cognitive, emotional, and ethical dimensions of the human psyche—a dynamic act that preserves psychological and existential balance against systems of domination. The dancer’s body ceases to be a spectacle; it becomes an agent of protest and resistance. A speechless language, it recreates the experience of “being” and freedom within imposed silence. From its ritual origins to modern forms, dance has journeyed from collective ceremony to individual expression and protest, continuously transforming repressed forces into motion and articulation—forces that are at once emotional and political, aesthetic and ethical.

Keywords: Art Anarchology, dance, repressed rebellion, discourse of silent protest, body-as-agent, psychological health, freedom and resistance, emotion and cognition, ritual and historical dance, body and non-verbal expression

Dance and the Logic of Emotional Rebellion

At its core, Anarchology holds that genuine psychological well-being is attainable only when the cognitive, emotional, and ethical dimensions of the personality function in dynamic harmony. This harmony is not merely an inner experience but manifests in one’s social, cultural, and political engagements. Whenever one of these dimensions becomes obstructed or fragmented, subtle yet persistent psychological pains emerge—pains through which justice is marginalized, love becomes a tool of domination or escapism, human dignity is eroded, self-respect loses vitality, interpersonal relations are damaged, and the early experiences of family life intertwine with insecurity and control.

In such conditions, to avoid psychological collapse, the individual instinctively resorts to mechanisms that humanity has collectively tested throughout history—mechanisms intended to restore relative equilibrium and open pathways toward transformative renewal.

The human psyche, in both conscious and unconscious realms, continually compensates in order to sustain survival and meaning. This compensation is not mere defense—it is a creative attempt to restore the “courage to be.” A cognitive and ethical courage to confront oneself, the other, and the structures of domination that corrode freedom and justice.

Within this perspective, dance appears as one of the most vivid forms of emotional action and reaction. It is a compensatory response to the triadic blockage of cognition, emotion, and morality—a movement that arises from the depths of feeling when thought becomes entrapped by dominant systems and ethics is reduced to obedience. Dance is the body’s revolt against the forgetting of freedom: an aesthetic rebellion that transforms pain into a language of liberation.

From an anarchological viewpoint, the dancer’s body is no longer an object of display; it is a subject of resistance. Emerging from the silence imposed on language and thought, the body reclaims its agency as a living act. The dancer moves not for pleasure or spectacle, but to open a passage toward the possibility of being—to unearth “existence” from beneath the rubble of obedience.

Yet the dancer is not necessarily conscious of the latent function or purpose of the act. Historically, humanity has danced without knowing why. There was neither a plan, nor a goal, nor a therapeutic design. While contemporary dance therapies are structured and goal-oriented, anarchic dance arises organically from necessity—the necessity of being, not the desire to achieve.

This movement is both instinctive and profound—a gesture toward psychic balance when the structures of power and social constraint have silenced expression. Conversely, a psychologically integrated person may not need dance as an unconscious outlet; for them, it remains within the domain of aesthetic pleasure. But for those in crisis, dance becomes a form of repressed rebellion, a language through which the unspeakable finds expression.

The dancer’s movement is a voiceless cry—a tangible resistance embodied in gesture, in trembling, in the pulse of muscles that carry the memory of pain. Through movement, the body transforms from an object of passivity into a language of protest. In this silent grammar, the body continues the unfinished speech of the repressed mind. Each step negates command; each spin revives a trace of lost freedom.

In the darkness of subjugation, the dancer ignites a flame of existential awareness—an awareness born not of abstract thought but of lived bodily experience. The body thinks through movement; thought itself becomes motion. This simultaneity of reflection and rhythm is the moment of anarchy: the embodiment of courage and resistance. Even in utter silence, the body still speaks—and this wordless speech marks the beginning of liberation.

Within patriarchal, hierarchical, and authoritarian structures—educational, cultural, political, religious, and social—where both feminine and the deeply human dimensions of feeling are repressed or commodified, dance occupies a paradoxical space: both disciplined and liberating. In the act of dancing, the silenced body reclaims itself, shifting from object to subject, from being seen to acting, without necessarily articulating or rationalizing its defiance.

In the language of Art Anarchology, dance is the “movement of silent awareness,” where the body substitutes for the blocked intellect. The energy that should emerge through critique or ethical action instead manifests in rhythm and motion. Here, dance becomes the moment of human re-creation within wordlessness—a way life escapes the order of domination and expresses itself through beauty, without being reduced to political or moral discourse.

From Ritual to Protest: The Anarchological Evolution of Dance

At its deepest level, dance originated as a ritual to restore the lost balance of existence—a ceremony of protection against the unknown and the forces beyond comprehension. In its inception, dance was neither performance nor art, neither relational gesture nor therapeutic exercise, but a direct communication with the elemental powers of nature, life, and death.

Before the human being learned to speak, they responded to existence through movement and rhythm—vibrating with thunder, wind, rain, birth, and death. Through bodily motion, they communed with the cosmos and with forces beyond language. This early gesture reveals that dance was, from the beginning, a substitute for thought: a language of emotion, and simultaneously, a language of return—to self and to being.

Just as a child expresses joy or fear through laughter, cries, or spontaneous movement, early dance embodied the primal language of human affect and life. Yet throughout cultural history, ritual became order, and order transformed passion into discipline. Dance evolved from a collective, liberating ceremony into a regulated, performative act.

At that turning point, the contradiction between the liberating essence of dance and its authoritarian form emerged. Religious and political systems preserved only the external shell of ritual dance—beautiful movements within the gaze of authority—while annihilating its core freedom. What vanished was the lived essence of liberation: dance as the body’s response to the loss of freedom.

Nevertheless, the latent energy of dance has never been fully subdued. Across time and culture, new forms of rebellious dance continually resurface—dances of the marginalized, the forbidden, the feminine, the street, the subversive. Each instance reactivates the same repressed energy, transformed from ritual to protest, from collective trance to personal uprising.

Thus, dance becomes a renewed language of dissent and resistance—a language that speaks not through reason or rhetoric, but through emotion and the body.

Conclusion

Within the anarchological spectrum, dance perpetually oscillates between two poles: as an instrument of order, discipline, and display under authority, and as a site of freedom and self-recognition. This tension reveals that dance is not merely a form of beauty but the body’s language of protest—an articulation of repressed rebellion and individual and collective liberation.

From ancient rituals to contemporary street movements, dance has mediated between lived experience and resistance to power. From the standpoint of Art Anarchology, dance transcends aesthetics and entertainment; it is both a psychological and social response, expressing inner disorder while creating pathways toward freedom. It becomes a means of knowing the human psyche and of regenerating the possibility of autonomy.

Ultimately, dance embodies the unity of body, emotion, and thought—a speechless language through which, even amid repression and subjugation, the body continues to speak, inviting the human being to courage, awareness, and self-recreation.

Reference:

Sadeghi Janbehan, Mahmoud. (2025). Art Anarchology (2/5): Dance as Repressed Rebellion and the Discourse of Silent Protest. Retrieved from: https://anarchology.blogfa.com