How does Dance signify?

Art is an articulation not of the feelings but about the feelings. It is not so much a relief of emotions but an expression of the abstract conception of feelings. Unlike language wherein an explicit and one to one relation is assigned to the symbol and the object, that found in art articulations are mostly implicit and not conventionally fixed. Therefore, the aesthetic of arts is always interpretative. But at the same time, the ambivalence of the relationship between form and content also endows arts with a special vigor – it allows a freedom of thought. Dance, as an art form, should be privileged with such vigor too. Yet, dance has long been associated with spontaneity and lack of intellectuality. While, there is little objection that dance deserves all its right to be a liberal art nowadays, controversies still prevail as of how dance construct meanings.
The accusation of spontaneity and lack of intellectuality has to do with the causal relationship between gestures and emotions. It has been conventionally believed that inner feelings give rise to outer expressions. The brain is in command of the extensions. For example smile while being happy, cry or frown while being sad or frustrated. Some of these expressions, for instance emotional expressions, are common across cultures. Most of human expressions, however, are culturally determined. Paul Ekman (1983) identified six target emotions and claimed that they relate directly to particular patterns of facial gestures. In his experiment, he asked participants to manipulate their facial muscle to the exact specification without telling them the emotion supposedly related to it. The result showed that by enacting the typical facial gesture, neurological reactions typical to the corresponding emotions are evoked. It implies that for some gestures, a causal relationship is present and it is universal. But Ekman also concluded that apart from these basic emotive expressions, most other human behavior is culturally constructed. In his study of American body language, Birdwhistell (1970) discovered that even the tiniest bit of behavior, which he called kineme as analogous to the linguist phoneme, is culturally determined. These kinemes are passed from generation to generation and becomes part of a tradition. Often, they are naturalized and people who are using them are not even aware of their constructive nature.
Similarly in dance, resemblance to ordinary movements obscures its symbolic nature and the ambiguity of the dance movement in respect of whether it is emotive or symbolic makes analysis of the art problematic. Gestures in dance are often misinterpreted probably due to an indifferentiative use of the term expressive, which blurs the complex nature of dance movements. Expression can have two dimensions. Langer identified between self-expressive and logically expressive gestures. Self-expressive gestures refer to the natural expressions of feeling which are symptomatic of existing subjective conditions. Logically expressive gestures refer to filtered expressions or transformed feelings wherein movements are “symbolic of a concept, that may or may not refer to actually given conditions.” (Ibid.:180) In dance performances, it is the virtual gestures initiated by logical expression to articulate some imagined feelings. But since the articulation is mediated by actual movements, the distinction between self-expression and logical expression becomes tricky. The close resemblance of dance movements to actual movements in life blurs the indicative and the symbolic functions of the movements into each other. In this connection, verbal symbolization has some advantage over non-verbal ones in respect of the cognitive recognition because words are generically different from the actual world. The abstractive nature of it is therefore much easier to come forth. Non-verbal symbolizations are often inspired by mimetic associations and as such the biological and intellectual boundary is easily undermined.
As said, dance is an instrument and an end. Dancers transform emotions into motions and the dance is experienced as a process and perceived as a physical reality. Therefore, dance can be understood as an action as well as an effect. And, it is therefore at once subjective and objective, personal and public, willed (or evoked) and perceived.” (Langer 1953/1967:174) The process comprises of the dancer, the audience and the dance. First of all, the dancer represents the character in the dance. S/he is only performing the character and is thus not the character. Her/his identity is a dancer but in the dance, s/he puts on the identity of the character. At this symbolic level of representation, the dancer is a “double negativity”. The actor is not the character s/he is (en)acting and at the same time, the actor is also not not the character s/he is (en)acting. S/he is a representation, both of him/herself as an actor and of the role. On the other side of the stage, the audience shifts constantly between the unconsciousness and consciousness of perceiving the actor as the role in the act and the fact that the actor is not really the role but is only acting. Perception is put into a mind frame where what is shown on stage has to be taken as real. There is a “suspension of disbelief” at work and in most theatrical performances; the hall where the audience sits is dark while the stage is illuminated so as to facilitate foregrounding the staged reality while receding the real life one.
There is controversy of whether the performer really has to feel the feeling in order to enact it effectively. Western orthodox theatre believes that reliving the emotional experience helps to deliver a genuine act. The discussion comes back to Langer's differentiation of self-expressive and logically expressive motions. In interviews with the dancers in a dance festival in the United States, Hanna (1983) found out that the dancers did not necessarily feel the emotion of the character in order to perform it effectively. Although the movements might resemble ordinary motions associative to the enacted emotion, they are representations of the emotion and are therefore symbolic rather than emotive.
If dance symbolizes, how does it work then? Hanna identified at least six modes or devices for conveying meaning that may be utilized in dance. They are:
1. concretization
2. icon
3. stylization
4. metonym
5. metaphor, and
6. actualization.
Concretization is a device of mimetic portrayal and is similar to Johnston's depiction by resemblance. Icon is a representation of something existent or nonexistent in the real world experience. For instance, a deity is enacted by representation although it is never actually been experienced in real. Stylization is representation by convention. For example, pointing to the heart as a sign of love. Metonym is a motional conceptualization of one thing for that of another, of which the former is an attribute or extension, or with which the former is associated or contiguous in the same frame of experience, for example, a war dance as part of a battle. Metaphor is to use one thing to suggest another by means of analogy. For example, a circular movement may be a metaphor safety, solidarity, stability and the never-ending cyclical characteristics of agricultural societies and the process of reincarnation. Finally, actualization is dancing in terms of one's usual statues and roles. For instance, Cuningham dancing as Cunningham or the director of a dance company etc.
Among these six devices, concretization, icon and stylization are most relevant to the form and content relation. Although stylization points to codified gestures which suggest its abstraction quality similar to that of verbal communications, the amount of abstract ‘vocabulary' is limited and most gestures are still based on ordinary behaviors. The tight relationship between dance gesture and ordinary movements are even more distinct in concretization and icon in which resemblance is the primary property. In his "Languages and non-Languages of Dance" Similarly, Johnston (1984) contented that resemblance is the "modus operandi" of symbolization in dance. Johhston's symbolization theory renders dance movements as a stand-in for real life experience. Departing from this symbolization by virtue of resemblance, all abstract dance forms such as those found in modern/postmodern theater are simply not symbols.
Dance movements can be functional in the sense that they serve to illustrate a narrative. Metonym, metaphor and actualization are common devices used in story telling, although stylization, icon and concretization are also found in dance narratives too. In narrative dance movements, meaning of a particular gesture has to be read in the context of the overall narrative. Stretching out a hand to a lady in a party scene represents an invitation to dance since in real life situation, similar gesture is in use. But what this gesture signifies may be more than just the desire to dance. Only a look into the wider context of the gesture can relevant signification be extrapolated. For instance, in a classical ballet, it may signify a highly codified and gender specified system of social etiquette. In a modern dance, it might signify farce or playfulness. In non-Western cultures, it could mean something else or in any case, it could be completely meaningless. Unlike verbal language in which words can be viewed as a discrete unit, dance has to be understood as a sequence of motions or relations. It is more comparable to a sentence in the verbal language. The representation in above case can be identified by virtue of resemblance or convention. But what the dance gesture means goes beyond the identification of representation. There is another level of meaning present - the signification.
Besides narratively functional, dance movements can be nonnarrative as well and function to portray or to express some aspects of the world. In nonnarrative movements, mimetic gestures are commonly found, particularly in the expression of emotions. Not only that most modern and postmodern dances are nonnarrative, they tend to break loose the form/content connection from the classical ballet. The rigid and codified dance gestures of ballet was repudiated and was replaced by natural movements such as those advocated by Isadora Duncun or expressive of inner feeling such as Mary Wigman and Pina Bausch. These dance styles went from one form/content paradigm to another form/content paradigm. If the ballet movements are codified mimetic gestures, these modern ones are natural mimetic ones. Postmodern choreographer/dancer Yvonne Rainer even took it one step further. Her dance comprises only of ordinary life movements e.g. walking, and she even used untrained dancers to do her dance. To her, dance is no difference from ordinary life. There is, in a way, only content without form in this kind of dance. On the other extreme, Merce Cunningham emptied out all contents in his dance. He declared that his dance is not pre-conceptualized and is pure form only. Surely, his dance is distinct from any daily life movements.
Yvonne Rainer's ordinary movement and Cunningham's pure form choreographies challenges the adequacy of Hanna's list of signification mechanism. Is Rainer's ordinary movements simply concretization? Even though the ‘dancers' walk the way they walk and stand the way they stand? Is it than actualization? Pedestrians acting pedestrian. But sometimes, professional dancers do the same roles. Also, is the dance a metaphor of city life indicating something by being that thing? As for Cunningham, in which category should his pure form dances be placed?
In an analysis of Rainer's Trio A, Sigman (2000) argued that meaning of the dance is discernible not through the mimetic or actualization character of it, but through Nelson Goodman's notion of exemplification. According to Goodman, something exemplifies a property if it both possesses and refers to that property. In other words, something acts as an example of while exemplifying that particular property of something. In Rainer's dance, the pedestrian as an example and a representative of certain characteristic of a pedestrian. In the same manner, the ordinary movements serve as an instance as well as a generalization. While exemplification helps to identify the action, it does not say much on how the motion creates meaning since exemplification works on only one of the possibly multiple properties of an enacted behavior pattern. It is by repetition of the same properties that the meaning of the dance is fore-grounded. In many cases, it is through exaggeration and repetition that enables the exemplification to emerge. The action thought to a typical instance of something may in fact just an example by association. Sigman equates this strategy of repetition to Goodman's system of repleteness in which every element has significance to the meaning of the work. In Rainer's dance, properties like uninflectedness, lack of performative focus, seeming lack of effort, even pacing are properties associative to ordinary movements. They do not necessarily actually characterize them. To apply this to Cunningham's ‘meaningless' dances, the repleteness of body motion in forms contrast his dances with others and foreground this characteristic of dance as its meaning. As Cunningham himself has said, “when I dance, it means, this is what I am doing.”
Conclusion
Dance, among other art forms, originates from live experience. Unlike most other art forms, dance uses the body and its motion as materials to articulate. The use of these natural materials obscures the intellectual nature of the art and cause the wrong impression that dance is symptomic. Langer showed that ritual and dance communicate with an equal cognitive quality as their verbal counterpart. Dance can be meaningful in many ways and a few aspects have been shown, particularly those related to its form and content.