Dance as a language, not just an art or a sport
By MOLLY THOMPSON – mmtthompson@ucdavis.edu
“Athlete. Artist. Dancer.”
That’s what the glittery t-shirt my 11-year-old self lived in proclaimed. Is dance a sport? Is it an art? My t-shirt said both, but it’s an age-old question. Maybe it’s an artistic sport? An athletic art? Conversations around how to categorize dance have fluctuated in tandem with the development of dance and society over the past few centuries, but we’ve never arrived at a definitive conclusion.
I propose a third option: I say that dance is a language.
The primary purpose of language is communication. Ballet (and dance as a greater medium) is also primarily a method of communication — the best performers are able to express wild and frenzied lore without speaking a word. Dance has its history in storytelling; ballets have always painted dramatic tales of love, loss and whimsy, and audiences are drawn to watch because of the visceral, poignant feelings they can absorb from the performers.
Stuart Carroll is the artistic director of the Sacramento-based Capitol Ballet Company and a ballet instructor at UC Davis. I’ve been taking his class here on campus since my first quarter as a first-year, and even though I came in with 15 years of ballet experience, I’ve truly learned so much from his guidance and training.
During class last week, he stopped the combination we were working on.
“The purpose of all of this is communication,” Carroll said, urging us to use our movements as a means of expression rather than simply executing the steps with the sole goal of being technically proficient. “Sometimes it’s the dancer to the audience, sometimes it’s the choreographer to the audience through the dancer. But that’s why expression is so important, because we can’t talk, so we communicate through movement.”
Yes, ballet is inherently artistic, but I would argue that language as a concept is also an art form. Poetry, songwriting and literature are all products of language as an artistic medium, and I argue that dance is the same — language as an artistic medium.
In order to be classified as a language, there must be grammar: a system and set of rules that dictate the structure of the language and how it’s used. Ballet has a clear set of rules. We always turn out our legs, we always point our toes, we have a clear formula for where we hold our arms and head in accordance with different body positions — everything is set on a foundation of basic rules that allow us to build complex serial patterns to convey meaning. This is exactly like the way we use the rules of syntax to form complex sentences out of smaller building blocks, which have a semantic value that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
In the early stages of learning a language, we’re taught to strictly adhere to the rules and follow the grammatical guidelines by the book. Once you master the language and gain a fluent understanding of how it lives and breathes and operates, you can start to break the rules for the sake of artistic liberty. And before you know it, you’re allowed to start a sentence with a coordinating conjunction because that’s your creative decision — even though your high school English teachers told you it wasn’t allowed.
Once you’ve mastered the basics of ballet technique (granted that, just like with spoken language, we’ll all be students forever), you’re allowed to break the rules for deliberate choreography. Sometimes classical technique isn’t adequate for what you’re trying to convey, so you alter it to suit your creative vision. That’s where the artistry comes in. That’s when it graduates from being a string of movements and becomes a story —- that’s when it becomes art.
Just like with any language, learning is a lifelong endeavor. Every day we continue to learn new words that elevate our communication skills; in every dance class we learn new moves that allow us to express ourselves in more sophisticated ways. It takes years of practice to accumulate the skills necessary to be truly eloquent; it takes years of practice to accumulate the skills necessary to be an exceptional dancer.
Language changes as society develops. Ballet looks different today than it did in the early days of its conception. Arbitrary letters become a vessel for a story when we string them together. Movements that seem meaningless in isolation become a narrative arc when we play them out in succession. Language is an art. Dance is a language.
Written by: Molly Thompson — mmtthompson@ucdavis.edu
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