Fundamentally, language allows communication between people. It uses shared and accepted representations of both concrete and abstract ideas to give people ideas of others’ experience, thought, or knowledge. Among all cultures, even those in which language has evolved for thousands of years independent of other influences, language is recognized by its grammar, context, and meaning. The word “language” commonly represents spoken and written words that, although learned, seem to originate in common human capacity for reason. In several respects, however, dance is also a human language.
Dance, as a form of language, communicates ideas. It uses an accepted vocabulary of movements to express ideas of things and thoughts. Emotions especially can be almost universally conveyed through movement. As people from different cultures can understand the emotions in unfamiliar music, so too can they in dance. Dance, like language, can have grammar. Phrases of a series of movements, such as a series of jubilant leaps, or timid, tiny steps, may convey one idea or tell one part of a story. These phrases are punctuated by pauses, like the commas of language, and stops, like periods. When a choreographer defies accepted grammar, especially in a formal dance such as ballet, they use the very lack of grammar to make a point. The change in center of balance that Mr. Adela spoke of serves such a purpose. Like language, dance can be further abstracted from obvious representations, so that the ideas conveyed are less clear. Poems with gibberish words violate the expectations of the reader, and in doing so prompt thought in a manner similar to modern dance. Modern turns traditional dance vocabulary and grammar on its head, or heel, or knee.
Unlike language, however, dance generally conveys ideas more generally. Rather than a phrase as specific as, “I am in love,” dance conveys the joy and experience of love through the force and rhythm of its motions. It is also used less often to communicate the ideas of individuals than the ideas of communities, as Alvin Ailey’s Revelations tells the shared stories of many people with the movements of a few, or as Native American tribal dances once represented an entire community’s attempt to communicate with a God. Dance, in its general ideas and common group mentality, in fact represents a more universal method of communication than words do, or can.
