An Outsider’s Look into Dance: The Language of the Body, Part 1 by: Joe Pierangeli

We flipped on the light and opened the curtains. The windows looked out on the clouds and the moving trees. We swept the floor while the dancers filed in. They began their warm up. Fascinating, the movements of a dancer. Not just in the act of their art, but in mundane every day things. Walking across the room. That last sip of water. Changing a pair of socks. There is a vitality, an awareness of motion lacking in the average man, the average woman. It is more than the interplay of muscle and bone and the angle of the sidewalk. There is intention. There is grace.

            Dancers talk with their bodies. In plain conversation. Telling, perhaps, a story from the work week, or where they ate dinner last night, the toe will tap this way or that to emphasize specific points. A flourish of the hand. A sudden change of stance. It comes naturally to them, like fingers touching the chin of a poet in thought. Or an astrophysicist walking past his front door. This was my introduction to the language of dance.

            Rehearsal started when the iPod dock came out. This particular dock cycles through the colors of the rainbow while playing. Music and the body are the only tools a dancer needs to create their art. And sometimes they don’t need the music.

            “How do they remember all that?” I asked Barbara Caioli, choreographer and artistic director, in reference to a staccato list of instructions from resident choreographer Rochelle Rapaszky to her dancers as the music blared.

            “Your body remembers.” She said. “You use your brain until the body takes over.”

            It must hurt to slam your feet and knees and elbows on the hard stage over and over. One dancer wore a wrist brace and I thought about that until they started dancing. As a writer, I couldn’t help but try to quantify how many words are contained within a single movement. Take for example, hands clutching the throat that certain way, or falling prone to the floor. The body is more than a means of conveyance from birth to death, a biological system that once wound down can never be started up again. The body is a tool of expression, a voice, common to all cultures, all languages, yet owing to none. As their movements flowed from one to the next like rhyme, the choreographers spoke about projecting emotion to inform the movements and determining focus to bring the steps to life. This is the content of dance. The language of the body.