What is it about?
Most discussions of dance traditions stay within the cultural environment of the dance. We, instead, look at characteristics of six dance traditions, comparing them, so that we can develop a metric for comparing how similar or dissimilar different dance traditions may be. This metric is based on a metric used in linguistic for comparing languages and organizing them into types.
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Why is it important?
Dance, like language, happens via articulation of body parts. All humans have the same articulators, yet dance traditions and languages differ. Linguistics has recognized that languages fall into different types, based on certain grammatical characteristics. In this paper we address the issue of whether dance traditions fall into different types, based on certain articulatory characteristics, using the linguistic model as a jumping off point. This paper is an example of the ways methodology in one discipline can be helpful to analyzing the data in a separate discipline. And it is one more example of how language and dance share certain properties of organization.
Perspectives
One can make narratives in many media -- sculpture, painting, music, and so on, including both dance and language. But what sets dance and language apart is the fact that the body is the articulator. It makes sense, then, to compare the organization of articulations in these two media/activities, looking for common principles that might govern their organization. This paper is an attempt at applying a parameter-based approach to variation in languages to variation in dance traditions. It's promising.
Donna Jo Napoli
Swarthmore College
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Suggestions for a Parametric Typology of Dance, Leonardo, October 2017, The MIT Press,
DOI: 10.1162/leon_a_01079.
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