The Beginning of an Idea

AKA, part 1 of who-knows-how-many about my impending senior project.

Freshman year at orientation, I remember walking into my Japanese placement interview with Kuwai-sensei and small talking with her. I told her I am also a dance major, and she said, “Oh! Dance—the language everybody understands!” I laughed and nodded.

It’s now junior year, and I’m thinking about this project. Because I have to submit my proposal by the end of this academic year... cue the swelling of dramatic music.

I have come back to this idea of dance as language and would like to investigate it, but I have no idea in what capacity I would like to research it. I often figure things out by writing about them. I also remember feeling mystified by the idea of mythical, horribly intimidating “senior projects” as an underclassman. Therefore, I decided to start writing on my blog about these interests as I see fit, to provide a documentation trail for myself and to maybe de-mystify the process, if any young grasshoppers scour my blog like I scoured my upperclassmen’s.

Firstly, there are some direct correlations for me between learning Japanese and learning dance. One such example I can easily call upon is this. I was having difficulty remembering a kanji (Japanese letter, more or less) that basically means “street.” The Laban notation for a straight pathway in dance is one vertical line, with a horizontal line on the top and on the bottom. Then I realized that it almost looks like there are two such pathways in the middle of the kanji, which is 街. Suddenly, I thought of a “street” as a “straight pathway” and voila, kanji learned.

I’m also very interested in dance as a vehicle for narrative, message, or statement. I’m certain this is not a surprise to anyone who knows me well enough to know that I love writing. As Mitchell Rose likes to say in Dance Film 1 this semester, “humans are riddle solvers.” When I watch a piece, I want to know why. Why are these two dancers dancing together—what’s their relationship? Why are they now ignoring each other? Why is the lighting blue, is it sad? Why is the music upbeat, is it happy? Why, why, why—what’s the story?

Even more specifically to the movement itself, Gina Hoch-Stall came to substitute for our contemporary class the other day and she said that we should think of our movement as words and sentences. Taking a breath here? Insert a comma. An abrupt stop there? Ending the sentence with a period. All the movement seeps together with no start or end? It’s a run-on sentence.

Taking that a step further, Dr. Nyama McCarthy-Brown said in contemporary the other day that if dance is a language, it has multiple languages, which have dialects within them. She said that oftentimes when we learn a new style of dancing with roots that are unfamiliar to us, we have an “accent.” We must learn the nuances of the movement, like the nuances of pronunciation, to remove our “accents” and become “fluent” or “native” in the movement. This idea intrigued me greatly.

Mitchell Rose was also talking in Dance Film 1 about how we absorb so much media that we have become fluent in “film language.” On a somewhat related note, he was talking about how the camera is sort of manipulative because the filmmaker tells the audience where to look: “oh, it’s her eye that’s interesting, see? I’m zooming on in it, you must want to see it…” I suppose in this way, the movement becomes the driving plot forces, and camera becomes the narrator…

I have a lot of thoughts. One day soon they’ll come into an idea… and soon after that, a methodology.... and the ball will continue rolling from there.