Is speech dance?

dance - movement practiced with intent

Is speech dance?

It is movement, but is it practiced with intent?  Most speakers do have the intent to speak (Tourette's Syndrome aside), and thus move the articulators in their mouth, but I would argue that they do not have full awareness of how those articulators move to produce words.  For example, when I teach Intro to Linguistics, most students have no idea that they raise and lower their velum (the soft palate) to manipulate air flow either out of their mouth or out of their nose to produce oral sounds (p, b) vs. nasal sounds (m).

What does this mean about the articulators, or the types of movements that count as dance?

• Does tongue movement count as dance?  The tongue makes regular contact with various parts of the mouth throughout the pronunciation of a word: on the teeth for 'th', behind the teeth for 't', on the hard palate for 'ch', on the soft palate for 'k').  Changing the point of contact results in different sounds, and even changing the gesture of the tongue results in different sounds (does it touch the roof of the mouth or only come close?  Is it tensed or relaxed?).  
• How about lip rounding [u] as in 'hoop'?  Or lip contact [p, b, m, even f and v]?
• What about the raising and lowering of the velum?  The jaw? The closing and opening of the glottis and the vibration of the vocal folds?
• Does the rhythm of the breath count as dance? The flow of air out the lungs?  The contracting of the diaphragm?
• How about the hands and non-manual markers used in sign languages? The movement, handshape, orientation, and positioning are more apparent to an audience (signers see the movements of their interlocutors, whereas speakers see only a portion of the movements of their interlocutors), but they are still part of the faculty of language and thus I would predict there are aspects of these movements that signers aren't fully aware of.

If you were aware of the articulators, could you perform a dance with them?

I am trying to think of examples of when manipulation of these articulators is intentional and the best I can come up with is beatboxing. [See Tom Thum above, but even he acknowledges these are "inhuman noises".]