Worldbuilding: Cardassian Dance
I have no idea if anyone’s done this yet, but I put it together while I was working on a fic. It was too much fun not to share.
Do Cardassians dance? Seems unlikely? It doesn’t bring glory to the state or whatever. Well, they don’t dance for fun - at least not in public. Too gauche.
They dance as members of an orchestra. They use their feet as percussive instruments when people are playing together.
‘Mel!’ I hear you preparing to type in the comments, ‘This is tap dance. You are describing tap dance. That seems out of character for your average Cardassian!’ and you would be right, because Tain had murdered for less.
It’s not tap the way you’re probably thinking of (which I’m assuming is La La Land or something similar). They don’t lift their feet the way dancers do in white western tap. Too showy with leg movements and too much emphasis on the individual. And they don’t wear metal shoes. Too loud to walk around in and they probably need the material for war or something. Their feet sound like they’re Flatfooting (traditional dance of the US South), and have a sneak-up-on you speed the way you can see it here:
But obviously with different musical vibes, and likely a bit slower. Cardassians put energy into this, but not so much as to appear enthusiastic.
But what does the dance look like? Cardassians dance with the staccato movement, the general sillhouette and probably the footwork rhythm that you’ll find in Lezginka dance (traditional dance out of Caucasus). If you look this up, you’ll see that there’s a lot of styles that fall under this umbrella, but I’m thinking specifically of something that looks like this:
So an amount of energy, but more powerful than frenetic.
I don’t think of the presentation of dance as varying much by gender, because they aren’t dancing, they’re playing musical instruments.
But if shoes are instruments, how do they speak to other instruments? How is that aurally? Not even a little bit chill. Not a whisper of jazz in there.
It’s a little bit like the way the shoes and the piano talk to each other in this:
Or the shoes and the orchestra talk to each other in this:
(Both of these audio clips are from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, composed by Joby Talbot, tap choreography by Christopher Wheeldon & Steve McRea)
That’s my take on dance in Cardassia. I’m not much more than a hobby dancer myself, but the dance world has been a special interest for a long time. Hope y’all enjoy the headcannon!
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