THE RÔLE OF THE DANCE
rowdy, exuberant, and owes much of its appeal to the feats of rapid and difficult co-ordination which the slapping involves. The jester's dance is peculiarly the dance of those who dance upon either side of the taupo, or the manaia, and honour them by mocking them. It is primarily the prerogative of talking chiefs and old men and old women in general. The original motive is contrast; the jester provides comic relief for the stately dance of the taupo, and the higher the rank of the taupo, the higher the rank of the men and women who will condescend to act as clownish foils to her ability. The dancing of these jesters is characterised by burlesque, horseplay, exaggeration of the stereotyped figures, a great deal of noise made by hammering on the open mouth with spread palm, and a large amount of leaping about and pounding on the floor. The clown is occasionally so proficient that he takes the centre of the floor on these ceremonious occasions.
The little girl who is learning to dance has these three styles from which to choose, she has twenty-five or thirty figures from which to compose her dance and most important of all she has the individual dancers to watch. My first interpretation of the skill of the younger children was that they each took an older boy or girl as a model and sedulously and slavishly copied the whole dance. But I was not able to find a single instance in which a child would admit or seemed in any way conscious of having copied another; nor did I find, after closer familiarity with the group, any
[115]
