Watching him dance was to watch the years slip away, the septegenarian became a young man, the jive steps of sixty years ago were second nature to him and his dancing partner. Dance seemed to possess more than an ordinary significance for him, as he sat with a pint of lager, the music that filled the pub was from more recent times. As the sound of The Killers 2008 hit, “Human,” provided a background to the conversation, the man joined in singing the lyrics.

Are we human or are we dancer?
My sign is vital, my hands are cold
And I’m on my knees
Looking for the answer
Are we human or are we dancer?

Brandon Flowers of The Killers explained that the song was inspired by a complaint by the American writer Hunter S. Thompson that his country was becoming “a nation of dancers.” The use of the singular forms of human and dancer suggests a distinction was being drawn between species, between being part of the human species and being one of the dancer species.

There are moments when dance seems so to transport people that they become detached from their ordinary lives as members of the human species and become something other. In dance, there seems a striving to escape from the mundane and the dull and, instead, to find meanings altogether different.

Brandon Flowers’ lyrics have a place in a tradition of reflection on dance, a tradition that finds dancing to be the expression of things that cannot be expressed in words.

At the end of Brian Friel’s play “Dancing at Lughnasa,” the character Michael Evans speaks a monologue recalling the place of dance in his childhood:

And what is so strange about that memory is that everybody seems to be floating on those sweet sounds, moving rhythmically, languorously, in complete isolation; responding more to the mood of the music than it its beat. When I remember it, I think of it as dancing. Dancing with eyes half closed because to open them would break the spell. Dancing as if language had surrendered to the movement-as if this ritual, this wordless ceremony, was now the way to speak, to whisper private and sacred things, to be in touch with some otherness. Dancing as if the very heart of life and all its hopes might be found in those assuaging notes and those hushed rhythms and in those silent and hypnotic movements. Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.

Are we human or are we dancer? In Brian Friel’s play it is undoubtedly the latter, perhaps the man in the pub would have concurred.