Is Dance a Language?

Dance is most certainly (see, I can use the word certainly in matters of opinion too) not a language. A language is a set of symbols used for communication. These symbols have, to some degree, an objective meaning, derived from consensus and relationship to other symbols. More importantly for the purpose of distinguishing art from language, these symbols, when replicated in other, non-artistic contexts, mean the same thing. Context, though it plays some role in understanding the meanings of words or syntactic structures, plays second fiddle to dictionary definition.

Dance, like any other art form, transcends language. It takes an idea, perhaps (but not necessarily) verbally expressed, and packages its emotional underpinnings in the form of body movements. Just as Guernica depicts the abstract concept of “pain” in a way that transcends language (it would not be very impressive to anybody if, in describing the Spanish Civil War, I said “pain pain pain pain pain PAIN pain PAIN), dance takes an already abstract concept and depicts it visually, using the artist as the medium of expression.

It is also different for that very reason. A dancer is a paintbrush. In language, if we are even allowing for an analogy between language and art, the word is the paintbrush. A human speaking is a painter. Dance’s painter is the choreographer. What interested me most about Dante was the fact that his art form splits the expression and expresser into two subjects. In painting, there is an artist (subject), and a paintbrush (object). Dance is more like music, in that the composer and performer both have subjective input. And as Dante mentioned, some dancers are just technicians. I can certainly recall writing a scathing (and irrelevant… I was fifteen) review of a certain guitarist in which I used the words “technician”, “machine”, and “automaton” to describe the impressive and soulless playing of a certain finger jockey.

Such a review would be impossible in discussing the merits of language. There is typically only one subject in speech. Oh, perhaps one person could write a speech and another could read it, but generally speaking the spoken and written word is emitted from its author. A good speaker (Barack Obama, anybody?) may be able to adapt someone else’s speech, but this is the exception rather than the norm. Nor are audiobooks and poetry readings the first thing we think of in a discussion about literature. But anyway, this is only a secondary point of dissent.

The real crux of the matter is the meaning of symbols in language, as opposed to the meaning of symbols in art. These fields may overlap in literature, but rarely in dance. A pirouette may be used for a thousand reasons in nine hundred and ninety nine plays. How many definitions can you give the word “happy?” Oh, a spectrum, perhaps, but it represents more or less the same thing to everyone, at any time, in any context.

Symbols and their relationships in a language are governed by a grammar. I challenge anyone who has seen a modern dance to find me rules of dance syntax. I can find you a meaningless dance, perhaps, but not an ungrammatical one. Because even the drunken cavorting of a nine year old who got into his parents’ liquor cabinet can be part of a story and be used meaningfully in dance. But drunken cavorting, if art were a language, would be analogous to, say, “arblalkjasge” in English. Or maybe to “Snakehemp jumped South Carolina May to degrees help of of the”. The dance analog is useful in some contexts, the language version is both meaningless and ungrammatical. Even that Miss America model who butchered the English language so beautifully (”I think that education also the such as…”) would recognize (unconsciously) that Snakehemp is not a word and that the prepositional phrase “to degrees” cannot be placed meaningfully next to the words following it.

At any rate, I think that everyone agrees that dance is a form of expression. But to call it language is to blur the lines between language and art, and it has always been my belief that the purpose of the latter is to pick up the slack where words simply fail.