Language and Dance: Intersection and Divergence
Language and Dance: Intersection and Divergence
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语言与舞蹈：交叉与分歧
DOI：
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发表时间：
2015
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Joellen A. Meglin
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
L. Brooks;Joellen A. Meglin
Movement language and verbal language are certainly different in nature: one uses body-action exclusively, the other uses words. But they also share a fundamental objective: to communicate. How are these languages distinct? Where do they overlap, intersect, even animate one another? As the stuff of art forms, movement is closely allied with dance, while words become the medium of literature. In this special issue of Dance Chronicle, we explore the interplays, overlaps, distinctions, and conundra that arise when these two forms of language, of art, are considered together. Many dancers and others often think of dance as a language, or at least as analogous to one. The following examples highlight language-based references to dance: Ballet’s steps are often called a vocabulary and are even explicated in a range of dictionaries, glossaries, and ABC books that explain the steps (like words or letters of an alphabet) that comprise it.1 Choreographer Ohad Naharin calls his Gaga technique a “movement language” that offers “a new way of gaining knowledge and self-awareness through your body.”2 Similarly, William Forsythe employs “universal writing” as a body “technology” in creating dances.3 A series of talks at London’s Sadler’s Wells is called “body: language talks” and addresses the body’s “central position as a memory bank of human knowledge.”4 Tap dancer and teacher Dianne Walker remarks, “I equate the 32-bar chorus to the paragraph. In Tap, we have sentences and there is structure in the paragraph: all sentences begin with a capital letter; there are commas, exclamations.”5 Dance composition texts, among other sources, often speak of the dance phrase as a sequence
