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| Still from "Pina", film by Wim Wenders, Choreography Pina Bausch |
Thoughts:
Pg 4 "Most everyone knows at least one language. Five year old children are nearly as proficient at speaking and understanding as their parents. Yet the ability to carry out the simplest conversation requires profound knowledge that most speakers are unaware of.
In a parallel fashion, a child can walk without understanding or being able to explain the principles of balance and support, or the neurophysiological control mechanisms that permit one to do so."
Thoughts: When I approach bringing dance as an option to "non-dancers" I try to connect to the part in all of us that has access, understanding sans training of using our bodies in time and space. So what are our basic movements as human? There are the fundamental/developmental ones that infants begin to master, from rolling over, to sitting up, to crawling, to standing and walking.
"Part of knowing a language means knowing what sounds (or signs) are in that language and what sounds are not."
For Dance as a language we have access to - we know our BODY. I wonder about considering the "sounds" are those things we know that are actually not defined (in their basic forms) by any cultural input, but in the body's capacity. Stand, sit, walk. Developing into basic locomotor moves: run, skip, leap, gallop. Axial movements: Twist, reach, stretch, flex. And how we begin to combine those. There are the movements that we make that are Functional:
- e.g. get out of the chair, push the door open, reach for the chocolate cake
There are the movements that we use to communicate:
Gestures seem to fall into two (at least) categories: Codified and non-codified. By codified I would say those are cultural (though some may be universal) like what a "wave" means as a greeting; what it means when you pantomime making a phone call, etc. And then non-codified would be the kind of impromptu sign language, pantomiming we use to communicate when we don't share a spoken language.
Of course there are codified sign languages, like ASL.
What else does our body communicate? We shiver, sneeze, cough, retreat, duck, strike out... I guess these could be broken into voluntary and involuntary. Shivering when cold, is an involuntary movement that may cause another person to respond by turning up the heat, or offering a jacket. Voluntary would be to reach out with a reassuring touch to a shoulder, or a child to strike out when feeling threatened.
Body posture, whether voluntary or involuntarily communicates in ways that deepen, or even contradict what might be spoken.
And then there is when the movement becomes expressive. This is perhaps when we begin to slip from the everyday into the art form. And depending on the depth of the human doing the expressive movement, can become a more and more sophisticated, complex, and abstract level of embodied communication.
"Not every speaker of a language can create great literature [or has a desire to] but you, and all persons who know a language, can and do create new sentences when you speak, and understand new sentences when created by others." pg 8 [bracketed is my insert]
All these years bringing dance as a means of personal expression to the not-formally-trained dancer/human this is what I try to tap into. That we each have the capacity for expressive movement, even if we are not (capable of or attempting to) create "great literature" in this case "great choreography." After thirty some years of doing this work, I have observed that once people are introduced to simple movement concepts they easily begin to make choreographic expressions - expressing abstracted ideas through movement that engages the Elements of Dance (body, effort, space, time). Maybe it is even more than that - I am not introducing them to simple movement concepts, I am just pointing out that they have them already. Just pointing out what is already there. Dance, in this way, is a language we all have but we are unaware that we have. Humans do not necessarily need to use their bodies beyond functional (turn the doorknob) but on some level humans use body to function communicatively to greater and lessor extents. Some people talk with their hands a lot, others keep their gesturing to a bare minimum.
Pg. 9: "Knowledge of a language, then, makes it possible to understand and produce new sentences.... few sentences are stored in your brain, to be pulled out to fit some situation."
This makes me think about the difference between being taught "steps" and creating one's own movement. If I continue to write about choreography and linguistics I am going to have to make this distinction. I see our work in ChoreoLinguistics as being interested in the "novel sentences" of what we are making with movement. The notion that if someone wants to do a dance about, say, Spring, there are predetermined dance steps that are the "Spring Dance". I come across this often in my teaching. People want to learn "the dance", not believing that there is not "the dance" but that our human capacity with our bodies is that we can produce our own dance.
Finite and Infinite. The notion that vocabulary is finite, but the capacity to create with the sounds and words is infinite. A limited idea that there is one particular style (e.g. Ballet) limits the participant to a finite vocabulary. And not only is that vocabulary finite, it is perhaps unattainable without years of predatory training. This is where linguistic terms and dance terms do NOT match. The vocabulary of Ballet is a finite list of steps, but how they are arranged by each individual choreographer is infinite. But extending that - the vocabulary possible by the human body is not limited by the ballet vocabulary and is much more infinite. Can you be more infinite than infinite?
Pg 11: "Our linguistic knowledge permits us to form longer and longer sentences by joining sentences and phrases together or adding modifiers to nouns." The choreographer (professional or lay) learns how to organize single movements or steps into phrases, and joining them together to create longer phrases which become sections of a fuller and fuller choreographic whole. Whether it is a one minute or 45 minute dance. What is the noun and what the modifiers in this analogy?
Improvisation and Composition:
Improvisation: Moving (dancing) in the moment, with or without a prompt or outside stimulus. A response to being here, now and moving. Perhaps like speaking. We make it up on the spot as we go and as we engage in the dialogues around us.
The Essential Chomsky Pg 34, "A record of natural speech will show numerous false starts, deviations from rules, changes of plan mid-course, and so on. The problem for the linguist as well as the child learning the language is to determine from the data of performance the underlying system of rules that have been mastered by the speaker-hearer and that he puts to use in actual performance."
When we did the "Parameters" exercise (One person improvises for one minute, other person watches and observes the movement qualities, spatial use, time use (Laban and BEST) that are unique to that person; and then feeds that back to the improviser. In this process, the improviser learns about themselves as a mover (a "speaker" of their body) and the observer learns about the movement language unique to that dancer/(equivalent to speaker).
Composition: (Also called choreography) is the intentional arrangement of bodies (or in a solo, the body) in time and space. Compositions can be repeated. Compositions can be edited, revised, refined, etc. Composition is equivalent to the written word. Improvisation more closely resembles the spoken word.
In the examination of ChoreoLinguistics we have been working mostly with Composition/Choreography. Perhaps we need to be equally using improvisation as our data set. I am not sure that students new to 'dance' would be able to jump into improvising in a way that would be helpful. This is a question. What skills would we need? What would it be like to do this with children who are not as removed from their bodies as modes of expression? Are there children who are not inhibited by pre-formulated notions of what dancing is and isn't?
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