I'm interested if for anyone else, the issues and notions that come with the idea "Dance Language" are as curiosity provoking and mouth watering as they are for me. 

I'm workshopping now when I have the chance on how we relate as dance practitioners to the notions and consequences of the notions of "Dance Language". 

So I started digging around, in a typical free lance way (autodidactic), in an area of linguistics called Performative Speech Act Theory.  From some rather stimulating material there and the coincidence that dance author/ dramaturg  Maaike Bleeker mentioned it in her amazing book "The Locus of Looking", i got hooked into an explorative process of bridging notions of language and how speech functions with how movement is generated and how it "functions" and comparing the two sometimes friendly sometimes antagonistic aspects of our artistic and daily lives.

The Workshop described below is my latest articulation of how I like to play with these things. My website www.bodiesanonymous.nl > In EDUCATION page has more details for those who get the bug.

Actually, my workshop has so much "play" in it, I started calling it a "Playshop".

Feedback and crazy discussion please!

Jack Gallagher

Bodies Anonymous 

Jack Gallagher / Guilherme Miotto

www.bodiesanonymous.nl

Body Rhetorics

A learner centered, explorative, practice based research workshop for dance practitioners

by Jack Gallagher

Are we people who emBody or bodies who inPeople?

In Body Rhetorics, Jack plays the role of colleague, coach and guide for artists with a physical practice interested in finding the serious fun of their “Linguistic Body” or what is now commonly called “Embodied Cognition”. Gallagher's artistic practice is a combination of Pure Dance, Dance Theater and Performance Theater.

Body and language are reciprocally influential. Think of how much time and energy goes into educating a body, primarily through the use of language. Think of how much designing and shaping a body undergoes by and through and for culture. Art is a frontier where notions about the normative body in rhetorical traditions can be cross examined and intercultural comparisons can take place.

Body Rhetorics is a dance/theater/performance workshop where the body's commitment to traditions, genres and contemporary ideas can be reviewed and spontaneously reinvented. Jack proposes to get any and all ideas going on the floor in as physical way as is appropriate, employing guided improvisation and composition exercises. General questions act as as specific departure points. What are we doing when we move? Are we 'saying' with movement? Are we belonging to a language community or are we free to construct with any and all signs randomly...do we choose to avoid signs in order to accentuate the real or the factual, the event nature of performance?

What we say is intricately wrapped up in how we say it and the context in which it's said. What is the implication for training and preparation, study and practice for performers making use of the 21^st century's “anything goes” dance/theater/

performance languages? Rhetoric is said to be the art of speaking, or writing which comes down to the act of persuasion. The contemporary dance/theater/

performance world has become increasingly pregnant with a variety of rhetorical acts, making use of many interdisciplinary skills and tactics ranging from speech to movement languages to new media environments to object manipulation to acrobatics to puppetry and let's not forget good old fashioned embodied acting.

Body Rhetorics is a playful work session, which can be adapted to various lengths and intensities, where Jack Gallagher makes use of his 22 year artistic practice as dancer/actor/choreographer and pedagogical background originating with Alwin Nikolais in 1990. With Nikolais, Gallagher learned first hand that a

workshop for stimulating artistic practice might as easily be called a play shop, once one recognizes the importance of play in the hard work of creative practice.

Gallagher has been compiling the Body Rhetorics playshop principals and exercises while during a two year research fellowship at Danslab, Den Haag, in the Netherlands ('09-'11) and as a Guest Artist at the International Choreographic Arts Center, (ICK) Amsterdam. As a guest artist there he created a 15 minute research presentation “Idioblast” performing with 4 dancers of the Emio Greco/PC dance company.

The principals made available as they become relevant are extracted from The Performative Speech Act Theory (PSAT) and the Actor Network Theory (ANT). The questions centered around our contemporary notions of dance as a language, and the body as possessing a language facility. Constructed by culture, the contemporary body is well versed in a multitude of modes of communication, often combined- visual, verbal, musical, sensual, kinetic.

What thresholds do we know need to be crossed, that we want to cross in the studio and take out of the studio into the world?

How 'what is said' performs in the world is still yet another thing.