Abstract:

Does dance convey meaning? Dancers and choreographers will offer a range of answers to this question, running the gamut from “Of course it does!” to “No way! It does something else.” Responses, predictably, seem to depend on artistic temperament. Some choreographers keep their audience in view during the entire creative process, striving for a complete, clear transmission of their intentions (without remainder, as it were). While, for others, choreography grows out of “deep improvisation” sessions in the course of what is largely an intuitive process. Ask philosophers the same question (many of whom are practicing artists) and similar disparities arise. Analytic philosophers of art, for instance, typically cling to some variety of intentionalism, the position that the meaning of a work art is - to certain extent - bound up with the intentions of its creator. On the other hand, those hailing from a more continental tradition will offer a variety of reasons for claiming that a work of art severs itself from the animating intentions of its creator. Once that dissociation is accomplished, it is easy to infer an irreducible polysemy, openness to interpretation, or even a “withdrawal” of the artwork from cognitive disclosure1. While one dance-theorist labors to preserve the dancer’s meaning-bestowing powers, another stridently maintains that dance productively disrupts meaning, or the closure and irreversibility that meaning implies. It is my conviction that both of the somewhat caricatured philosophers mentioned above have bought into the idea that one must answer the question from the vantage-point of a global assessment of the art form. To me, a “sometimes yes, sometimes no” response seems more defensible, but, will be, for many, less satisfying. I aim to compensate for that initial deficiency by examining a remarkable choreographic practice that upends a set of assumptions that philosophers across the board have uncritically adopted vis a vis dance. So while either philosopher can be right (depending on the case), both are, in another sense, completely mistaken about what dance can do. The assumption that I aim to dispose of is the following: regardless of whether dance can convey meaning, it cannot convey discursive, linguistically articulated meaning, at least, not by itself. Obviously, if a series of “movement-phrases” are accompanied by text in a dance, then the dance conveys meaning in a sense. But the written or spoken words are the vehicle for that meaning, while the dancing functions as a kind of ornament, or more charitably, a sort of aesthetic response or interpretation. Through examining the “movenglish” dance practice of Charly and Eriel Santagado, I will argue that their choreographic language - while completely bodily, that is, not reliant on the display of written or spoken words for its intelligibility - can convey meaning in exactly the same way that discursive representations do. But I’ll go even further than this to argue that movenglish can convey the sort of meaning that written or spoken words transmit in a way that makes certain aspects of that meaning more salient. In other words, movenglish doesn’t merely translate meaning from one signifying system to another; it reveals meanings or aspects of meaning nested within the initial system, which tend to fly under the radar in ordinary communicative contexts.