THE LANGUAGE OF MOVEMENT

Dance is language through motion and is a language of movement 27. Through dance a panoply of meanings and events can be conveyed and displayed. Dance accomplishes this in part, by utilizing natural movements and gestures to convey that which needs not words in order to be understood. These movements, insofar as they are unconscious yet meaningful, are under the auspices of the limbic system and the limbic portion of the old cortical motor center, the basal ganglia.
Unfortunately, among modern day humans, many of these signals are seldom attended to and many of these movements are suppressed, hindered by clothing, and in the process of "growing up" are forgotten or greatly modified by the neocortex. Still, even when not dancing, the movement of the body speaks volumes.
Communication through movement preceded the development of language and thought as is evident from studying the language of bees. From an evolutionary perspective, regardless of species, it has always been through observation or the detection of movement that one is able to make a multitude of judgments regarding the motivation and intent of those who are moving such as a stalking predator about to strike.

Movement, in fact is a main source of communication for modern human beings and is the earliest and most primitive as well as the most advanced form of communication. Even spoken language is based on movement and gesture. That is, in order to speak, words must be formed, articulated and expressed via a complex synergy of movement involving not only the lips, larynx, lungs, and tongue, but via complex programming which takes place in the cerebellum, basal ganglia, and motor neocortex of the brain.

Human dance, language and movement, is of course, much more complex than that of the bee and involves a considerable degree of flexibility and maneuverability a bee is not capable of. Complex movement and complex communication are linked.

One need only compare the dance maps of von Fritch and his honey bees, and Laban's "icosahedron," a spatial map of all potential human movements, to see this most dramatically. The "icosahedron," is basically a geometric, spatial map which indicates all the points of orientation in space including the dynamic tensions arising between different movements oriented in different directions 28. Via this scale, which also takes into account the force of gravity, any and all of the potential movements that can be made by woman or man can be identified.

Based on this geometric analysis of movement in space, Laban was able to develop what he called a "vocabulary of movement," and established a system of movement notation called Labanotation (or kinetography). Labanotation allows for the precise recording of all aspects of three dimensional movement including its timing, continuity, and extension in space.

Given the multiplicity of potential human movement, perhaps it is no surprise, that in comparison to bees, humans are able to symbolize, abstract, and represent that which has no representation. This is because with increases in the ability to make complex movements, the ability to communicate complex messages increases as well. However, to accomplish this required that the hands and limbs become adapted for purposes other than walking, wing flapping, or holding on for dear life.

In fact, as the evolution of complex movement preceded the development of spoken language certain movements are able to effectively communicate and express some forms of information that cannot be handled well by spoken language. For instance it is much more effective to describe a "spiral" by gesture than by spoken words.

Gestures can be executed more rapidly than speech, and can convey concepts that are quite cumbersome to describe verbally. Indeed, it has been estimated that the human hand is 20,000 times more versatile than the mouth in producing comprehensible gestures.

Nevertheless, human beings have grown accustomed to listening to spoken language and paying less attention to these movement based cues. Although potentially linguistically complex, due to the imposition of civilization and formal learning, movement as a means of communication has become diminished, more repetitive in nature, and quite restricted. Clothing restricts movement as do social expectations. For Isadora Duncan, movement is most communicative and spiritual when it is most natural and unhindered by clothing. However, when movement is restricted, so to is human consciousness. She lamented:
"Very little is known in our day of the magic which resides in movement, and the potency of certain gestures. The number of physical movements that most people make through life is extremely limited. Having stifled and disciplined their movements in the first stages of childhood, they resort to a set of habits seldom varied. So too, their mental activities respond to set formulas, often repeated. With this repetition of physical and mental movements, they limit their expression until they become like actors who each night play the same role." 28.

Date: 2014-12-29; view: 831