Dancing To Make Connections by Mariana Trevino
As a young girl, I never expected dancing to be so expressive as someone who used to be in dance class during my elementary school years. I love dancing mainly because it gives me the freedom to express myself how I feel whether it’s being happy or sad. Dancing became an exciting hobby for me, and till this day it still remains one. I dance in my room either for fun or to practice a dance to better understand its steps as I turn on my headphones and move around my room. Each dance comes with some sort of meanings and connections, and it always made me wonder how dancers of any kind like ballet, jazz or just freestyle, come up with dance moves that can communicate meaning? This question mainly matters to me because I always wanted to know how communication works when it comes to any movement. This curiosity could also help out dance students who either are interested in dance or have any interest in the same topic to help them better understand how communication can be in effect through movement, and most significantly, without using any words, which is what makes dancing unique. To understand how dancers create dance moves that can create connections through meaning, I chose mostly scholarly sources with the most important ones first and then the ones I find the least helpful but useful. The first article that I found was titled Dance as Communication: Messages Sent & Received Through Dance and this text helped me understand how nonverbal messages can be sent through movement, and this was useful because it gave me different methods of nonverbal dancing and how it works. This alongside Dance as Communication: How Humans Communicate Through Dance and Perceive Dance as Communication tells me about a thesis over dance and its communication with meaning while showing me different examples. Then with Nonverbal Communication Through Dance explains how dance can be expressed through messages with emotional dance therapy and nonverbal communication, and finally Is Dance a Language? Movement, Meaning, and Communication describes how dance can be expressed through language and vocabulary. Together, all these sources help me better understand how dance works with communication and meaning in several ways described in each essay. My first source that I want to discuss is titled Dance as Communication: Messages Sent & Received Through Dance by Melissa Peick. One thing that she mentions in the text is how nonverbal dancing can have mood changes throughout movement. According to Peick, she states, “In other words, dancing may change moods, serve as a force of attraction, and influence perception, all through physical movements and nonverbal communication (Brabazon, 1998; Oseroff-Varnell, 1998),” (pg 1). This quote focuses on how the change of moods can describe how dancing can express moods without having to say any words but instead just movements. I agree with this quote because dance can be meaningful with emotions and expressions, and also tell us a story through movements, such as happiness or sadness along with what type of music they dance to. I remember when I used to be in dance class, my dance teacher would always come up with many dances that we could express with our emotions and perform them in our recitals and competitions. She would either play an upbeat song for a happier theme or a slow song to demonstrate a calmer theme. This helps me understand how dancers can make communications with expressions to understand what the dancer is feeling or expression with emotion without having to say any words but just using face and movements. The second source that I’ve read was titled “Dance as Communication: How Humans Communicate Through Dance and Perceive Dance as Communication.” by Samantha Rounds. A quote that stood out for me would be “Significantly, dance plays a bigger role in communication; it is communication through physical movements not reliant on vocal elements and sounds,” (pg 4). This statement tells me that dance can provide communication without having to rely on voice and sounds. I remember when I used to watch other dancers in my dance recitals use all kinds of movements that communicate with other dancers and the audience to provide us about what the dance was about like a story or a message. This quote connects to my question as Rounds tells me how dancers can create communication with movements and use the soul to say words without having to say anything.
The third text that I’ve read was called “Nonverbal Connection through Dance,” by Mirela Arsith and Daniela Aurelia Popa Tanase. Both authors, according to the article, state “The essence of interpreting body language is ‘reading’ the experience, feelings, attitudes of a person.” (pg.54) In this quote, they say that in order to understand what a dance means, the audience needs to look deeper into the movements and feelings of the dancer to get the idea of the story or message the dancer is trying to say. This made me remember a time when I watched a video for my online dance class titled Cry, and I had to understand what the dance meant. I studied the slow movements and her expressions and captured the idea of how the dancer felt within the performance. She sent out messages of grief about how she dealt with discrimination in the beginning and then ended up with a feeling of hope and determination to keep going. This quote can relate to my question because the authors talk about how people can make connections and read dances through emotion and with the use of body language to understand the meaning of a dance. The last text that I read was titled, “Is Dance a Language? Movement, Meaning, and Communication” by Henritta Bannerman. One idea that she gives out in the text is how dance can be described as a language with movement and making connections with movement. The author mentions in the article “...I proposed that dance movement by and itself produces utterances rather than sentences thus when choreographers seek to convey a story or to relate the finer points of a social or political situation, ancillary or contextual elements such as setting, music, costume and in many instances linguistic text and/or dialogue are required” (pg. 77). This quote means that dance can be meaningful without having to say full sentences or any words and use elements to describe and illustrate a story or message in a dance. I reconnected this statement with the “Cry” performance because I could tell by the setting and the actions the dancer did tell her story of discrimination and grief and then move on to more bolder movements to represent a change in the mood of the story to describe the feeling of hope and confidence. This quote associates my problem as Bannerman tells me how dancers can connect meaning through dance by having a similar way to language but without having to say words or sentences but by using elements like setting and music. The question that began my investigation was how dancers of any kind come up with dance moves that connect meaning, and I was hoping to find different kinds of answers and turns out, these articles gave me some fascinating answers. I found out that without much use of voice and just letting the body do the talking, the use of different elements like setting and music, and by looking closely over the moves a dancer makes in their dance helps me understand how dance can connect some sort of meaning. These sources helped me better understand how dancers create connections simply by studying the body and its movement with gestures and expressions. Learning about this was pretty great, however there is something else that I would want to know more of. That being, how can dancers come up with stories and put it all together in a dance, kind of like a somber story or a story of freedom from a hard time? I might ask a professional dance teacher for an interview, and they could tell me some helpful tips or ideas on how they come up with their stories and then put it into a dance. With this idea in mind, I believe students like me who are into dance might want to get that idea on the dancers and their stories and might get inspired to make up their own stories and make a dance about it too. CITATIONS Peick, Mellisa. Dance as Communication: Messages Sent & Received Through Dance Journal of Undergraduate Research viii 2005, pg 1-11. Arsith, Mirela, Tanase, Daniela Aurelia Popa. “Nonverbal Communication through Dance.” issue #1844-7562, Vol 12 no. 1/2018 pg. 53-63. Bannerman, Henrietta. “Is Dance a Language? Movement, Meaning, & Communication Dance Research: The Journey of the Society for Dance Research, Vol 32, no.1, pg 65-80, Summer 2014 Author's Bio Mariana Trevino is currently majoring in business in marketing and believes that this decision will positively impact her career in the future. Mariana Trevino as a young girl felt inspired by dance; which brought her to write her essay ,”Dancing To Make Connections”, which emphasizes the expressiveness of dance as well as the nonverbal communication it elicits.Throughout her life, dance was a passion and is still passionate about, experiencing dance in her recitals caused her to be qualified to speak and write about dance. Her favorite form of dancing is freestyling, but she sometimes tries to aim for hiphop or jazz. Aside from dancing, various pastimes of hers include singing, playing games, shopping, and writing fanfiction from her favorite media. When asked for a closing statement for aspiring dancers she stated, “If you ever want to try and do something new like dancing, don’t ever be afraid to try it out even though you may not know how to. You can always learn either by yourself, watch some videos,or take any dance class. You may fumble a bit but I promise that you’ll do amazing and don’t ever give up and keep doing what you love, you’ll get to where you would want to be in the future. |
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