LANGUAGE AND COMMUNICATIVE MOVEMENT: DANCE, DISCOURSE REPRESENTATION, AND ILLOCUTIONS

Abstract

This paper endeavors to open up the domain of narrative dance to formal semantico-pragmatic inquiry, taking case studies from Indian dance drama and classical Ballet. It thus posits narrative dance as a richly promising domain of research and analysis in its analogues to, and interfaces with, discourse based on language. The communicative intent of narrative dance – alongside its aesthetic-cultural semiosis – is typically directed at the audience’s (re)cognition of discourse referents and their actions in the dance space. It therefore lends itself to the scrutiny of Discourse Representation Theory or, more broadly, dynamic semantics, which are recognized frameworks for the formal linguistic analysis of narrative, and more rarely non-narrative, discourse. This intent in dance, however, differs from those of ordinary-language communications, in that it allows for creative play to convey shifting discourse-referent identities. Such creative play is brought into focus in the very different treatments of “stage” versus “individual”-level identities of the respective central characters within two case studies, viz., the (North-)Eastern Indian dance drama Chitrāngadā, on the one hand, and Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, on the other. While illocutions are conveyed through hand-gestures and (facial and corporeal) mime in these different traditions, they crucially play a complementary role in discourse representation as this latter pertains to narrative dance. The paper concludes by highlighting this mode of analysis as a means of achieving greater insight into viewers’ / connoisseurs’ responses to narrative and non-narrative dance subtypes as possible clues as to how meanings are construed out of these dance genres.