“Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes emit confused words”

Charles Baudelaire, “Correspondences”, in The Flowers of Evil

I have collected in this essay my thoughts on the role and value of dance in modern society. I have organized them around three interconnected points. I care about each of them deeply, and I hope that my reflections will help you gain insight into some of the fundamental principles that guide my work as a choreographer.

My first point has to do with the power dance has to communicate what I call “natural meaning” in an especially rich and sophisticated way. The philosopher of language Paul Grice distinguished two kinds of meaning. The first is “conventional” or “unnatural” meaning: this is the sort of meaning words acquire in a language. For example, when I say “I’m hungry”, this particular string of signs and sounds has, in and of itself, nothing to do with the state of my body; the words are connected to what they mean only by convention, which is to say by a kind of implicit agreement we have to use the words a certain way. Were I to speak a different language, I would express the same idea with a completely different string of signs and sounds, for example “estou com fome”.

The second kind of meaning, however, is what Grice calls “natural meaning”. Imagine that you are out on a walk, for example: you see smoke on the horizon, and you take the smoke as a sign that the forest is burning. In nature, smoke means fire, and this association between the sign (smoke) and its meaning (fire) holds independently of any conventions. It does not matter what culture I grew up in or what language I speak: as long as I am a member of the human species who shares with you the same evolutionary history, smoke will mean fire for me just as much as it will for you.

Our body is a piece of nature, and nature is imbued with natural meaning. If my stomach is growling, and my body is emaciated and shriveled, that is a sure sign that I am hungry. In modern society, however, we are pervasively surrounded by conventional meaning. Unless I explicitly ask for food in a way that is acceptable in light of our conventions, unless I can voice my request by filling out the right forms, society will turn a blind eye. Often we do try to get back in touch with our body, as when we hope that an emoji will capture our emotion better than words and let our friends know how we really feel...but our vocabulary has become poor, and the signs on which we rely are often cartoonish and crude: the communicative results are clumsy, and they rarely do justice to their source. We have forgotten the importance, depth, and richness of natural meaning.

Dance is, more than any other art, the domain in which, through the sophisticated use of bodily movement, natural meaning is celebrated and elevated to its greatest heights. Dancing, and watching dance, is a way to become more fluent in the language of nature, and indeed excel at it, when the dance is excellent! By dancing, and watching dance, we become more attuned to our bodies and our environment. Truths concerning our physical and natural selves, which we had forgotten or suppressed, are presented to us in the most powerful, surprising, and artful of ways.

Of course, natural meaning has its limits, and dance is especially prone to playing with them. We are linguistic creatures after all, and as such we will continuously feel the urge to reinterpret our experience of dance and translate it into words. We will try to superimpose conventional meaning onto natural meaning, and translate one into the other. Rather than seeking to avoid this in my work, I try to gently guide the audience by providing carefully selected interpretative resources.

Although dance has the power to reach what is speechless, natural, and universal, when we superimpose conventional language and translate its content into words, it will speak of different things to different people. This is not only beautiful, but also valuable: it gives us a solid and universal starting point while also pressing us to share our own individual, diverse perspectives as well as to appreciate the beauty, and the enriching nature, of disagreement. Among all the arts, perhaps only poetry matches dance in this capacity to layer meaning onto meaning, and to speak of different things to different people, all at the same time, by relying only on a relatively sparse number of signs. I delight in the fact that different interpretations of the scene are salient to different people. It is as if each member of the audience is bringing into the picture materials taken from their own individual story, and this helps them make sense of the situation. The truth is that the interpretative nature of dance is pliable, and that all of these interpretations can be equally true at the same time, as long as I decide not to rule them out by providing detail which works explicitly to that effect. After all, as Baudelaire’s poem reminds us, nature’s meaning is itself sometimes confused: it is not univocal, least of all when we are dealing with such highly complex natural phenomena as our bodies and their emotions, and it is at bottom this which supports the rich diversity of interpretation.

The last point I want to raise concerns the capacity of dance to represent and exemplify the intrinsic value of the human body in a way that no other art or discipline can.

Our body is a wonderful, useful tool; it is the crucial instrument on which we rely in order to realize most of our desires and projects. We use our body to move from where we are to the place we want to go next, we use it to cook, to work, to love. The incredible versatility and usefulness of our body makes us forget that its value does not only reside in its being a means to something else, a tool to achieve all of the good things we want to achieve. Our body is also valuable in and of itself, in all its strength, elegance and beauty.

Dance is the only art that reminds us of the fact that the human body is a genuine source of intrinsic value; in its essence, dance is a celebration of the human body and an exploration of its distinctive powers not for any purpose that may be alien or external to it, but simply for its own sake. While sports and other athletic disciplines are indeed interested in exploring the possibilities of the human body, as well as its limitations, in a variety of ways, even there however this activity is always directed at the achievement of some external, and sometimes rather artificial goal, such as beating a record or winning a competition. Dance is not like that; like all other art, its meaning does not depend on any value it may produce outside itself, but unlike all other art, its language is essentially bodily. I think this is one important role dance plays in modern society: by celebrating the human body as a source of intrinsic value, which is to say as a source value in and of itself, independently of any other good things it may be able to bring about, it reminds us that the human body must as such always be respected and cherished, and that its reckless exploitation is an offense to our own humanity.

A special thank you to Lorenza D’Angelo and Steven Woodworth.