Dances centered around drums are performed in many cultures. Anthropologists sometimes refer to these as "drum dances". Drum dances may have various kinds of spiritual or social significance.

Kalahari Desert

Anthropologist Richard Katz reports on a drum dance that the !Kung people in the

Kalahari Desert The Kalahari Desert is a large semi-arid sandy savanna in Southern Africa extending for , covering much of Botswana, and parts of Namibia and South Africa. It is not to be confused with the Angolan, Namibian, and South African Namib coastal d ...

perform. In !Kung, the dance is called !Gwah tsi. The dance takes a few hours. Women dancers form a horseshoe shape around a male drummer. The dancers may experience a spiritual sensation called kia while they dance.

North America

Dene and Slavey

When

Dene The Dene people () are an indigenous group of First Nations who inhabit the northern boreal and Arctic regions of Canada. The Dene speak Northern Athabaskan languages. ''Dene'' is the common Athabaskan word for "people". The term "Dene" ha ...

drum dances are performed, the performers aim to get their audience to dance. If everyone in the audience gets up, the style of music changes. At some point in the cycle, the drummers stop drumming and the audience and performers sing and dance together.

Slavey The Slavey (also Slave and South Slavey) are a First Nations indigenous peoples of the Dene group, indigenous to the Great Slave Lake region, in Canada's Northwest Territories, and extending into northeastern British Columbia and northwestern ...

perform a drum dance led by a group of

frame drum A frame drum is a drum that has a drumhead width greater than its depth. It is one of the most ancient musical instruments, and perhaps the first drum to be invented. It has a single drumhead that is usually made of rawhide, but man-made mate ...

players. The Slavey drum dance has components including the tea dance and round dance.

Haudenosaunee

As of 1985, a drum dance was performed on the Six Nations of the Grand River. It was led by a drum player, who also sang, assisted by a horn rattle performer. Anthropologist

Gertrude Prokosch Kurath Gertrude Prokosch Kurath (1903–1992) was an American dancer, researcher, author, and ethnomusicologist. She researched and wrote extensively on the study of dance, co-authoring several books and writing hundreds of articles. Her main areas of ...

watched drum dances at the Six Nations reserve and reported that the dance had four major parts: (1) an introduction, (2) the procession of dancers into the

longhouse A longhouse or long house is a type of long, proportionately narrow, single-room building for communal dwelling. It has been built in various parts of the world including Asia, Europe, and North America. Many were built from timber and often rep ...

followed by singing, (3) a set of chants and prayers, and (4) a recapitulation of part 2, the singing phase.

Innu

Innu drum dances or circle dances are called innuniminanu. Innuniminanu are performed with only one drummer.

Inuit

The and

throat singing Throat singing refers to several vocal practices found in different cultures around the world. The most distinctive feature of such vocal practices is to be associated to some type of guttural voice, that contrasts with the most common types of voi ...

are two traditional forms of

Inuit music Traditional Inuit music (sometimes Eskimo music, Inuit-Yupik music, Yupik music or Iñupiat music), the music of the Inuit, Yupik, and Iñupiat, has been based on drums used in dance music as far back as can be known, and a vocal style called ''ka ...

. Inuit drum dance songs, or pisiq, are typically based on a five-note scale. They usually have a

strophic form Strophic form – also called verse-repeating form, chorus form, AAA song form, or one-part song form – is a song structure in which all verses or stanzas of the text are sung to the same music. Contrasting song forms include through-composed, ...

. The drum played during the Inuit drum dance is called a

qilaut The qilaut (Inuit: "that by means of which the spirits are called up",Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. ''Primitives and the supernatural''. Haskell House Publishers, 1973 , , pg 132. syllabic: ᕿᓚᐅᑦ) or qilaat (Greenlandic) is a type of frame drum nati ...

Copper Inuit Copper Inuit, also known as Kitlinermiut and Inuinnait, are a Canadian Inuit group who live north of the tree line, in what is now the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut and in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region in the Inuvik Region of the Northwest ...

use the drum dance "to honour members of the family, to express gratitude, and to welcome and bid farewell to visitors". Jean-Jacques Nattiez describes a drum dance in Igloolik as an "endurance competition" in which performers are tested on their recall of songs and ability to keep performing as long as possible.

Ojibwe

The drum used for

Ojibwe The Ojibwe, Ojibwa, Chippewa, or Saulteaux are an Anishinaabe people in what is currently southern Canada, the northern Midwestern United States, and Northern Plains. According to the U.S. census, in the United States Ojibwe people are one of ...

drum dances, sometimes called the "dream drum", has been considered sacred. It may be treated as a living thing. A story says that the dance drum was brought by a Sioux woman called Tailfeather Woman or Turkey Tailfeather Woman to the Ojibwe. According to the ethnomusicologist Thomas Vennum, this story is accurate and the events it describes likely occurred in the 1870s. Elaine Keillor says the date was 1877. Several anthropologists agree that the Ojibwe drum dance, rooted in this origin story, derives from the grass dance. Vennum uses the word "society" to describe the groups that perform the grass and drum dances. Drum dance societies are composed of a drum owner, singers, and others.

Tłı̨chǫ

Tłı̨chǫ The Tłı̨chǫ (, ) people, sometimes spelled Tlicho and also known as the Dogrib, are a Dene First Nations people of the Athabaskan-speaking ethnolinguistic group living in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Name The name ''Dogrib'' ...

drum dances, called Eye t'a dagowo, happen at nighttime. Dancers move clockwise, single file, in a circle.

Yup'ik and Iñupiat

Yup'ik The Yup'ik or Yupiaq (sg & pl) and Yupiit or Yupiat (pl), also Central Alaskan Yup'ik, Central Yup'ik, Alaskan Yup'ik ( own name ''Yup'ik'' sg ''Yupiik'' dual ''Yupiit'' pl; russian: Юпики центральной Аляски), are an I ...

and

Iñupiat The Iñupiat (or Inupiat, Iñupiaq or Inupiaq;) are a group of Alaska Natives, whose traditional territory roughly spans northeast from Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the northernmost part of the Canada–United States border. Their current ...

drum dances are composed of repeated musical phrases. The drum played in these dances is called a suayaq or kilaun. Nicole Beaudry, describing a Yup'ik drum dance she saw in Alaska in the late 1980s, says that there were four or five drummers who sat together on a bench, singing, surrounded by dancers. Sometimes, a drummer who wanted to dance would be replaced by one of the surrounding dancers.

Papua New Guinea

Anthropologist Nancy Munn describes a drum dance done on Gawa Island, one of the

Marshall Bennett Islands Marshall Bennett Islands (also known as the Marshall Bennets) are several islands in Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea. Geography They consist of: * Gawa * Dugumenu * Iwa Island * Kwaiawata * Egum Atoll with 12 islands ** Yanaba Island (reef) ...

. The dance is generally held nightly at some point in the year. It is a way for young people to meet potential sexual partners. The dance occurs around a tree called the dabedeba tree; drummers and singers stand there when the dance is going on.

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