Movenglish: Dance as Sign System

The paper examines a central question in the philosophy of dance from the vantage point of a specific choreographic practice: Movenglish. Movenglish attempts to establish a one-to-one mapping between English words and dance movement equivalents in the body in a way that maximally captures both the c...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Niko Popow
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: University of Warsaw 2023-11-01
Series:Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture
Subjects:
Online Access:https://eidos.uw.edu.pl/movenglish-dance-as-sign-system/
Description
Summary:The paper examines a central question in the philosophy of dance from the vantage point of a specific choreographic practice: Movenglish. Movenglish attempts to establish a one-to-one mapping between English words and dance movement equivalents in the body in a way that maximally captures both the connotative and denotative aspects of the words in question. The paper argues that the success of Movenglish has several important consequences for the philosophy of dance as well as our understanding of sign systems more generally. The paper elaborates one of the strongest contributions to the philosophy of dance – the work of Susanne Langer – in order to show how the conclusions drawn from the dance produced through Movenglish both contribute to and depart from Langer’s philosophy.
ISSN:2544-302X