Shaker Dance

The United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing began among English Quakers in the middle of the eighteenth century and reached North America in 1774 under Ann Lee. Their neighbours called them Shaking Quakers, then Shakers, for the visible way the Spirit was held to work on the body in their meetings: shaking, trembling, whirling, involuntary shouting, speech in unknown tongues, and falling. In the earliest period none of it was arranged. A meeting was open and what happened in it was understood to be given rather than planned.

From the 1780s onward the community deliberately changed this. The unordered motions were shaped into set exercises with names, taught to the whole society and rehearsed, and a leadership emerged that composed new ones and circulated them between the villages. This was not a retreat from the earlier enthusiasm; the Shakers argued it directly. A gift of the Spirit was to be received and then given order, and a body under the Spirit should be a body doing something well rather than a body out of control. They called the practice labouring, which is the word they used for the dances themselves, and they placed it at the centre of worship rather than at the edge of it, which almost no other Christian body in America did.

The named exercises included the square order shuffle, danced in ranks moving forward and back; the circular or round dance, in which concentric rings moved in opposite directions with a group of singers standing still at the centre; and marches of various figures that filled the meeting room floor. Men and women danced separately and faced each other across the room, in keeping with a society that was celibate and that separated the sexes in nearly everything. There were no instruments. The Shakers sang, and the singers carried the beat for everyone else.

The period from about 1837 to the 1850s, which the Shakers called the Era of Manifestations, brought a wave of received songs, drawings and dances attributed to spirits, including songs said to come from Native American, African and other spirits and sung in what the receivers understood to be their languages. Simple Gifts, written at Alfred in Maine in 1848 and now the best known Shaker song in the world, comes from this period, and its text is a dance instruction as much as a hymn: to turn is the point of it.

Membership fell steadily from the later nineteenth century as the celibate community stopped receiving new members in numbers. The village at Sabbathday Lake in Maine is the last, and it is very small.