Towards semiotically driven empirical studies of ballet as a communicative form

Abstract

This paper treats dance as a movement-based semiotic system, focusing on classical ballet as an example in order to show how dance can be made accessible to both detailed description and empirical investigation as a form of communication. The study contributes to a growing tradition of multidisciplinary research that looks at a variety of dance forms from the perspectives of linguistics, communication studies and social semiotics, drawing additionally on recent developments in the formal semantics of non-verbal semiotic systems and on empirical methods emerging within functional accounts of multimodality. The paper consequently develops a particular treatment of ballet that offers a principled means of linking the physical stream of movement, recorded using motion caption technology, and discourse interpretations, such as those that are typically narratively relevant in classical ballet but which may be found in other forms of dance as well. The paper sets out how this may then support further empirical research by importing well-defined methods and even specific questions from linguistics and related fields.