We wrote earlier about nature and dance.
Here we continue to write about it. Actually, we have two interesting stories to share. One story is about pinguins that dance to survive and the other one is about ballerina dancing to save swans.
Living in the Antarctic can be extremely chilly, so Emperor penguins perform a mass dance to stay warm in such a harsh climate. The penguins huddle together; their behavior is obviously an instinctual action in order to survive in such harsh climates.
These unique birds that do not fly huddle together to keep not only themselves warm during the coldest temperatures, but also their eggs and young. If one lead Emperor penguin makes the slightest movement in any direction, the whole mass ensues in a wave of black and white feathered bodies in order to keep the warmth.
A physicist named Daniel Zitterbart, at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Germany, studied the Emperor Penguin flocks. He found that they started to huddle closer together when temperatures start dropped below zero. The birds use each others body heat and mass to avoid the wind and chilling temps.
This is really a great example of how dance connects and also enables this cute birds to survive.
Just as I found this article about pinguins that dance the news came out that a Russian ballerina from the world-renowned Mariinsky Theatre dressed in full costume performs scenes from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake… not on stage though, but on the frozen Gulf of Finland. This is Ilmira Bagrautinova’s way of objecting against the construction of a port in Batareinaya Bay, a popular beach about 100 km west of St. Petersburg, Russia’s second largest city. Bagrautinova danced in -15C and posted her videos online. She hopes her performance will save real swans which nest in the bay.
This is how dance is used in ecological activism.
That beautiful dance at -15C you can watch here.
Sources:
https://guardianlv.com/2013/12/emperor-penguins-perform-mass-dance-to-stay-warm/
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ballerina-dancing-ice-real-swan-202019680.html
