Dance, fashion, and wizarding secrecy

[beccaelizabeth]

I do not know how the wizarding world got waltzes. They would have had to learn them from muggles. If the wizards went into isolation at the end of the 1600s then their dance traditions should evolve from Renaissance and early Baroque, whereas the waltz is a late 18th century innovation. With several centuries of entirely separate tradition there’s no particular reason wizard dance should look like British formal dance, unless there’s some kind of muggle relations politics gone into it. But I do Bollywood dancing and there are so many very different ways to do dance it’s ridiculous to think they’d just end up looking exactly the same.

Same with fashions - they self isolated before the great male renunciation, there’s absolutely no way that men’s formalwear should have done the same thing on its own. Menswear should still look as colorful as, for instance, Indian formalwear can.

Or if they’re trying to keep hold of the moment of Secrecy as some culture defining thing they should be wearing all sorts of fancy, and doing dances with lots of kicks and jumps, and holding to British tradition but from so far back most people never heard of it.

Also I know ceremonial magic isn’t a thing in HP but if there’s any focus on group work then dance is a great way to practice it. And dance forms can mimic courtship, with degrees of hand holding being appropriate or inappropriate, spiralling together and apart. Or it can weave couples in to larger formal groups. And it all says something about the culture the dance is from.

To have wizard dances look like the sort of thing gets taught in primary schools makes its own kind of sense if muggleborn wizards lead fashion.

But it seems unlikely purebloods would be encouraged in that.



It just bothers me.

Isolate cultures should be different.

In interesting ways.

Comments

[anne_d]

Absolutely. Isolate cultures diverge, you see it all the time. Dialects are an example; Emily says even flocks of birds that are separated develop their own dialects in their songs.

I think the magic users liked to think of themselves as isolated, but that was just another facet of their snobbery.

[sgac]

Accents! Accents in the wizarding world would signal just as much social information as twentieth century British accents, but it would be impossible for Muggleborns to decode. Imagine how disorienting that would be.
I've always wanted to see HP fic with the second person singular preserved in wizarding language, even though it was on its way out in the 17th century.

And things like personal hygiene - weekly baths, probably, even if magical plumbing is capable of more.