ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by exploring how sound, music and dance variously shape sexual meanings and emotions in ritual display. These modes of performativity are then shown to be related to everyday sexual behaviours, raising questions about how intimacy, passion and desire are embodied and experienced cross-culturally. The chapter examines the relationship of sex to desire as expressed in various kinds of bodily display and sex acts. Ritual disguise and masquerade allow sexual expression to be flaunted whilst providing cover for the dancer, and these expressions are about displaying sexual prowess at the same time as referring to the natural world and to transitional periods. Colonial and Christian religious authorities banned songs and dances that referenced sexuality as part of ritual episodes. The proliferation of different kinds of social dancing offered new potentialities for dangerous liaisons through which the boundaries between ‘good and bad’ sexuality could be stretched to the limits.
