About Ghungroo

Ghungroo is a free guide to the dances of the world. It has pages on 439 dances and dance forms from 143 countries so far, and 3,195 more are on the list to be written. Ghungroo are the strings of small brass bells that dancers across South Asia tie round their ankles: they turn every step into sound. The name stands for the idea that a dance is something you can hear, see and place.

The aim is simple: anyone should be able to look up any dance and come away knowing what it is, where it is from, how it moves, what it is danced to, when it is danced and what it means to the people who dance it.

How it is arranged

Every dance is filed by country and, where the sources allow, by city, state or region; by form (classical, folk, social, ballroom, street, ritual, court, dance-drama, concert, martial, mask, historical); by formation (solo, couple, circle, line, set, group, procession); by occasion; by faith tradition where it has a place in worship; and by the instruments it is danced to. Ways of dancing explains the gatherings and systems around dance, such as the milonga or the arangetram. The dance calendar ties dances to the days they are done for.

Pictures and drawings

Photos come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences, each credited beside it. Every dance page also carries drawings made by Ghungroo from what the page itself says: the formation seen from above, the rhythm as a strip of beats, and a line sketch of the dancers. The drawings are diagrams of a kind of dance. They are not portraits of a particular performance.

What is live

Dancing today is rebuilt every day from the calendar: which festivals are under way, what is coming, and a dance of the day. New dance pages are written every day, the news wire is checked every few hours, and every page is re-read against its sources over time.

How a page is made

Names and facts come from Wikidata and Wikipedia. The text is written afresh with AI assistance from those sources only: the facts are kept, the wording is ours. Every page is then compared with its source article, and a page that repeats a run of the article's words is rewritten or held back. Each page names its source and links to it and to its licence. Further reading links are ones the source article itself cites from well-known publishers and institutions. A page is published only if it has enough to say; anything that falls short waits for a person to review it.

What Ghungroo is not

It is not a dance class: pages describe how a dance is done in outline and link to places where you can watch it. It is not the last word on any tradition: teachers, villages and families differ, and the people who dance a dance know it best.

Care

Dance is bound up with identity, and many dances are claimed by more than one country or community. Ghungroo lists a dance under every country it belongs to and reports disputed origins as disputed. Sacred and ceremonial dance is described as those who keep the tradition would describe it. If a page about your dance is wrong, write to us and we will fix it.

Who is behind it

Ghungroo is published by ClearTrust, a company that measures traffic quality for the advertising industry. ClearTrust pays for Ghungroo and keeps it free. Ghungroo is part of the ClearTrust IVT-Free Publication Network. IVT stands for invalid traffic: visits from bots and other fakes, which the network's sites are screened for. Editorial decisions are not for sale: sponsored placements are always labelled.

Get in touch

To suggest a dance, correct a page or ask a question, write to ghungroo@cleartrust.cc.