To lay a foundation for the upcoming process, the team began by discussing how contemporary dance and spoken word differ – in performance and in reception.
Both forms seem to cater to selective audiences – aficionados and fellow practitioners – rarely a mainstream audience. Why?
Full appreciation of contemporary dance requires prior knowledge of dance, enabling the audience to fully appreciate the technique and subtle aesthetics of the form.
Because dance is highly abstract, audiences may enjoy the energy and imagery while trying to interpret what they see, but as a form it is so broadly abstract that the meaning-making is limited. General audiences seek a level of meaning-making that dance seldom can accommodate.
Full appreciation of performed text (such as a poetry reading) benefits from a background of literacy – the more savvy the audience, the readier they are to access the complexities of text at performance speed. General audiences may enjoy the surface text level and the energy of the performance, but miss out on the richness of the texts. The more complex the text, the more easily the general audience might become overwhelmed. They might access it better if they were reading it for themselves, but at the speed of performance, literary appreciation can be highly challenging.
Two Languages
Jon shared the way meaning is created and conveyed, an important thing for creators to be aware of. Before meaning is applied, a word is just a sound heard or a shape seen – even more abstract than a physical gesture (at least the body recognizes another body’s muscular tensions and intensions). The elaborate process of assigning meaning to specific words is dedicated to clarity – the result is language – mankind’s most advanced tool of communication.
By contrast, dance is highly intimate and personal – drawing meaning from the dancer’s own body and energy. Over time, these personal patterns and postures become acknowledged as a physical language of sorts, but one that is as detailed to a dance practitioner as it is vague to an outsider. This language is still largely instinctive – which makes it primal in its power but challenging to decipher. Aiden shared that even fellow practitioners would find it difficult to agree on what meaning goes into a dance sequence, or what it is meant convey to the audience.
To better understand what makes the two forms different, we drew up a list of contrasting qualities.
What makes each form tick?
Moving (Sprinter) | Text (Marathon runner) |
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“It’s always Shakespeare.” |
“Sometimes, it’s Shakespeare.” |
Comparing these qualities, we discussed which qualities make each form more accessible to the audience.
What “superpowers” does each form have?
Dance has the universal immediacy of the human body – arguably more direct, visceral and truthful than text. While less direct in meaning, it can be powerfully direct in conveying emotions. Perhaps this is why dance and music are natural twins – they share a similar abstraction as well as a visceral impact.
Text has a powerful specificity – linguistically, culturally, intellectually. It can convey complex ideas with clarity. After all, every word chosen is an accurate and “ideal” choice.
Figurative text can evoke complex associations of meaning. Descriptive text can trigger the senses vividly. Narrative text can tell stories with deft manipulation of time and causality, The use of subtext allows a depth of meaning beyond the words themselves.
The goal of fusing these forms would be to achieve a hybrid performance style that combines the strengths and counteracts the weaknesses.
What advantage might there be in fusing the two forms?
A fusion of dance and text can give the universal body a clarity and complexity of meaning, while granting a visceral power to the text. For the general audience, the text element provides a focal point – a point of entry – as well as a scaffold for meaning-making; while the dance element can reveal subtext through the visceral power of the human body, as well as provide vivid imagery to help audiences ‘decode’ intricate literary devices.
Possession of the words
We discussed seeing performances where text and movement are combined, and identified some strategies they have employed :
text is often a backdrop, almost like a soundscape
text as a literal backdrop – woven into the set or multimedia design
text as initial trigger for choreography, and featured as such – like an artifact
text as provocateur - triggering connections
text as thesis - often used to describe themes in marketing materials and programme notes. This synopsis of meaning may offer a framework for the viewer to ‘decipher’ the performance (similar to modern visual art)
What is rarely seen is the text’s meaning forming the content of the dance performance. But not in a “charades” mode, where the dance merely tries to convey the text itself
Can the dancer “own” the text in the same way an actor “owns” the script? There are two aspects of this – the actor tries to “possess” his/her lines, but the lines of other characters also have to flow through the actor, leaving their mark. Can it work for the dancer the same way?
What keeps dancers from wanting to engage more deeply with text?
The team acknowledged that part of the reason text is less used in dance is the lower level of literary appreciation in our culture – due to education trends as well as language proficiencies. This puts our arts scene at a disadvantage – our works cannot reach higher levels of meaning and profundity because our artists are not “bilingual” – they cannot speak through both the text and the body.
Another reason for fewer dance practitioners experimenting with text could be that dance is a discipline heavily focused on perfecting technique – much of a dancer’s development is spent attaining prescribed skills levels. This leaves very little room for developing other sensitivities.
3 questions that drive our exploration : How do we help contemporary dance and text to fuse better? How do we help the moving body to become more sensitive to text as performance content? How do we enrich the performance of text through the moving body? |
Our quest : to develop a fusion wherein the moving body “possesses” the text’s meaning, as if both text and movement flow from the same origin of meaning, even though they express it differently. Let’s call this “Moving Text”.
And beyond : Can encouraging the fusion of text and dance help develop more “bilingual” artists, able to merge both languages for greater communication?
Can it also help “train” an audience to become more eager and able to understand and appreciate both forms, by nurturing them with the hybrid?
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