Paleochoreography on Rock Drawings of Tuva

The term "paleochoreography", introduced in scientific usage at the end of the last century, determines a joint investigation of monuments of Paleolithic art by archeologists and choreographers. The world of rock art of Tuva is rich and diverse, and has long been the object of careful scrutiny of archeologists and historians. Along with this, numerous rock drawings, discovered on the territory of present-day Tuva, are of great interest for scholars who study the history of the culture of dancing and for practitioners of modern choreography. The rock drawings of Tuva, showing various stages of historical development of prehistoric ancestors of the present-day Tuvans, depicted a wide range of paleochoreography of our ancestors: dances of primitive hunter-gatherers; dances of farmers and stockbreeders; dancers imitating snakes, birds and animals; ritual, military, funeral, everyday and work dancing ceremonies. This article studies paleo-choreography depicted on the rock drawings found on the territory of present-day Tuva. The aim of the paleochoreographic analysis was to reveal main components of statics and kinematics of the images of participants of ritual and everyday dancing ceremonies of the ancestors of Tuvans depicted in rock art of Tuva, and to get a deeper insight into the semantics of their dancing via a thorough analysis of dancers' poses and movements on the rock drawings. Paleochoreographic analysis is of great significance for present-day Tuvan choreography because it contributes to the restoration of a lost dance culture of the Tuvan ethnos and makes it possible to develop and improve national dance folklore of the Tuvan people. In addition, the analysis of the paleochoreography of rock art of Tuva will contribute to a further advance in the multidisciplinary study of a richest historical and cultural heritage of the peoples who inhabited the territory of Tuva at different epochs and will open new horizons for comparative study of the cultures of different peoples of the world.

Keywords

Authors

References