I am researching whether dance can be considered a language, and different languages effects on movement quality. i am interested in how dancing to spoken word, interpreting it affects dancers cognition, is it that we are listening to the rhythm of the words and sentences using our embodied movement vocabulary or is it that dancers are trying to interpret the spoken language in its literal meaning if they understand the spoken languages? Is it possible to translate spoken word with just movement and allow the audience to understand it without previous knowledge of the spoken languages? is it possible to understand spoken languages through movement only, even in its simplest context?
Dear Karolina, thank you, it is a very interesting question! I think we can consider dance as a language. Dance has a common ground with language (Hagendoorn, 2010) and with process of verbal communication (Foster Leigh, 1988). Dance being a system of signals and symptoms always influenced by socio-cultural codes and its meaning is a product of cultural agreement, the result of a systematic use of various choreographic codes and conventions (Popa Blanariu, 2013; Aboo Backer, 2007). Here, I think, you can find some interesting ideas: Foster Leigh, S. (1988). Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American Dance. University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles, London. Aboo Backer, M.B. (2007). Semiotics: Signs and Meanings in Contemporary Dance in Malaysia. Journal of Arts Discourse, 6, p. 71-76. Aleksandrovich, M. (2016). Psychology of Dance: Barthes’ Ideas and Semiotics of Dance. EUROPEAN HUMANITIES STUDIES: State and Society, 1, p. 4-19. At: http://ehs-ss.pl/czasopismo/EHS-SS-01-2016.pdf#page=4 Good luck with your research! Please, stay in touch!
Karolina, this is a very interesting field to tap into and I might have some ideas to share here. I haven't studied dance as a particular art form but I think that you're preoccupied with the idea whether dance can be a system of communication. It is true, it can be. Don't sign languages bridge the gap between dance and spoken languages?
But I have a different question for you. What is the use of one more communicative system if there are just enough out there?
Twentieth century French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari once, and indeed throughout their career, warned against the modern neurosis of searching for meanings, against "interpretosis". 'Let's be done with meanings once and for all,' they thought. 'The world is already sick of looking for hidden messages, reaching out for what might be planted for us by a transcendent force out there in the universe'.
It is time we pushed language to its borders and deprived it of its potential to make sense.
Antonin Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, which you might find very appealing, is centered on the idea that language divides our existence into the mental and the corporeal. For Artaud, existence doesn't take division, it's unified: We are unified with the entire force of life. Theater of Cruelty was an attempt to give back to the body what it had lost in the process of history - beauty, oneness, integrity, truth - by neutralizing communication and creating a form of affective sense/sensuality for the body, which is not separated from the mind, as dictated by the Sauseauran explanation of language as a signifier-signified structure.
Disrupt binary structures, they only limit thought Karolina.
The art of dance lies in its potential to mute signification. Just as it is true of music or other art forms. We only sing, play or listen to music when words fail to express what we feel. Language can't capture what's outside itself, the extensive/intensive reality that lies behind its scope. Don't you dance when you've had enough of talking?
I'm going to shut up now just to make language shut up.
Actually it came more from the fact that I am multilingual but I only created dance using English language. When I count in Polish (let’s just say 1, 2, 3, 4 but in my native language), which is my first and native language, the words have different accent, dynamic and rhythm than in English. My creativity already is working differently and the same movements I did choreographing in English become slightly different. So what I mean by translating dance and movement into communication form is that I am also thinking about if it’s possible to translate a different language to audiences who don’t understand it, and how.
But also i am trying to show my dissertation supervisors who are sceptical about my thesis, that if I find similarities between spoken languages, gestures and body language then I actually am right with saying that dance and movement can be languages too.
What a great question! Within Systemic Functional Linguistics the idea is that all modes of communication are about meaning making and they are governed by the same basic principles - Arianna Maiorani has done some great work on the grammar of dance in this tradition, so that might be worth checking out.
I think dance does have a communicative function just like language. It maybe worth your while to consider the concept of multimodality and the idea that meaning can be negotiated through a wide range of semiotic signal other than language itself. There are multimodal semiotic signs available to communicators to use as viable and more effective and convenient meaning making and negotiation tools. Kress is a respected scholar in this work. You can also refer to work done on multimodality by Pippa Stein Etal. I hope this helps a bit.
Great question, and with some good answers already. From a linguistic point of view, dance *could* be a language (because it’s a set of infinitely recursive symbols), but it isn’t (as far as I know) because it has no stable and shared conventional meanings. At least two people have to associate sufficiently similar semantic values to the whole symbolic system for it to truly function like a language, i.e. an arbitrary set of symbols whose structured combinations evoke shared and mostly stable concepts. (The “shared” bit mandates at least two people!)
As to your other question regarding whether native language influences movement, I really have no idea, but my instinct would be to say yes! I am also bilingual and feel that I have slightly different personas in the different languages I speak. I’m not really sure how to quantify that difference, but your suggestion that native language might influence physical movement dors not strike me as implausible at all! 😊👍
Yes. there are several written forms of dance language. already in the 17th century Pierre Beauchamp developed a written notation for Baroque dances. There are also notation for Israeli dances, Morris dances etc. Also for ballet several notations have been developed. Some are very beautiful, unfortunately it is not possible to copy images into this message, but look up dance notation in Wikipedia and you will learn a lot more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dance_notation
There is also an entry in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/art/dance-notation#ref252588
Have fun
John
Interesting connected material. I hope you can find here useful things. I liked them:
Bannerman, Henrietta, 2014. Is Dance a Language? Movement, Meaning and Communication. Dance Research, 32(1), pp. 65-80.
Batko, Chelsie, 2012. Dance and Movement as a Form of Communication. Marginalia - The graduate Student Blog - Columbia College Chicago.
Blacking, John, 1977. How Musical Is Man?. Seattle, London: University of Washington Press.
Bloch, Maurice, 1974. Symbols, Song, Dance and Features of Articulation Is religion an extreme form of traditional authority?. European Journal of Sociology, 15(1), pp. 54-81.
Brown, Steven; Parsons, M. Lawrence, 2008. The Neuroscience of Dance - Recent Brain-imaging Studies Reveal Some of the Complex Neural Choreography Behind Our Ability to Dance. Scientific American, 299. kötet, pp. 78-83.
Luck, Geoff S.; Burger, Saarikallio B.; Toiviainen, Petri; Thompson, Marc R., 2010 . Effects of the Big Five and Musical Genre on Music-induced Movement. Journal of Research in Personality, 44(6), pp. 714-720.
Pines, Rachyl; Howard, Giles, 2017. Dance as Intergroup Communication. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, pp. 1-21.
Zhang, Yan-jie, 2009. "Dance Is the Hidden Language of the Soul" - On Spiritual Homeland of American Modern Dance. Studies in Culture & Art, Issue 浙江省文化艺术研究院.
Жиленко, Мария Николаевна , 2000. Танец как форма коммуникации в социокультурном пространстве. Москва: Государственная академия славянской культуры .
Пименова, Жанна Викторовна , 2015. Танцевальная коммуникация в эпоху цифровых технологий. Научный вестник МГТУ ГА, 215. kötet, pp. 122-126.
Isadora Duncan claimed that if she could communicate something in words, she wouldn't have to dance it (sorry I can't lay my hands on the actual reference right now but I think it was Anya Peterson Royce, "The Anthropology of Dance" Indiana University Press 1980 and subsequent editions). I think that's an oversimplification. We very often use gesture/movement to enhance our verbal communication, don't we? That can vary between individuals and cultural settings - check out the many anthropological works, some powerful examples of which stems from your university.
In my own research, I found that teenage dancers created dance to convey feelings about their identity - reinforcing it for themselves and communicating it to others. On the subject of being able to interpret 'meaning' in a dance, my references are quite old now, but I see in my PhD thesis that in Best's (1999) view, an observer cannot really know what the observed person is feeling, but that Curl (2005) thinks one can "imaginatively empathise" (2005: 59) with the observed person." (Oliver 2009).
It's a big question!
Hello Karolina,
I've just happened on your discussion. We are always communicating through movement, intentionally or not aren't we? I work and dance a lot with people who don't have verbal language, so yes dancing, moving and touch is their language. I'm also interested in your ideas around being multi-lingual. It is not something I'd considered before, how speaking a different language changes the language of the body. However, since I moved to France 3 and a half years ago and observed my children become bilingual I am fascinated in how the tone of the body (as well as the voice of course), quality of movement and gestures change when they speak French. They quite literally become different people and I think respond differently to situations depending on whether they are 'in' English or French. You are probably experiencing that when you teach in different languages, are you teaching from a different place, attitude, orientation? I think it is more than just sound and rhythm etc....Just thoughts but I'm interested in your research...
Thanks Lisa
I guess it certainly is a way of communication. All musicals have a plot, climax and a resolution in which intended messages are conveyed through music and dancing. About cognition, the rhythm, lyrics, bps and tempo all contribute phonological loop I think, which enables dancers to move in accordance with the music.
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