The dance is a living language which speaks of man - an artistic message soaring above the ground of reality in order to speak, on a higher level, in images, and allegories of mans innermost emotions and need for communication (Wigman, 1966: 10)

What wants to be said? By ‘said’ I mean communicated. How do we connect experiences, ideas, and perceptions from the outside to the inside and the other way around? If the media is the message, let the media be the body. Looking back at McLuhan's remarkable quotation  “the medium is the message” (Mcluhan, 1964: 2), I would like to organise and relate my cognitive kinetic experiences with the theories of artistic meaning and language philosophy of Susanne Langer, Curt Ducasse and Robin Collingwood collected and discussed by Harry Gagberg in Art as Language, in order to disclose dance improvisation and dancetheatre (open up in discussion with Valeria A. Brainshawg) as embodied poetry, and therefore, as poetic language. 

First of all, it is necessary to go over the metaphoric uses of these verbs: to see, to feel, to speak, to say, to write, to show, to smell and to read. We commonly use these verbs to replace other ones such as: to understand, to express, to comprehend, to grasp, to reach, to internalise, to discover, and several others. Daily expressions such as ‘that music doesn't speak to me’, instead that music does not make me move or, that music does not move me: meaning it does not provoke a deep emotion within me are used in daily interactions; or something similar like  ‘I can't read her’, instead I can not understand her, are examples of how we divert language in order to explain that which can only perhaps be felt. Metaphors coexist with us, as a way of describing that which is not logical for the standardised language, but is desired to exist and hence it does, as a poetic language. It becomes communicable. The purpose of this explanation is to invite the readers not to take too literal and not to narrow the meaning of these verbs; but instead to go for a walk or make a movement as you read, trying to feel and abstract the meaning of these words making use of your entire body, as an octopus would.

Language has been used for making sense of the word, both material and nonmaterial. Poetry, on the other hand, tries to make sense of inner and outer word by a reorganisation of the senses; or as Rimbaud would say “A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematised disorganisation of all the senses” (1871) Why is the figure of the poet so important and what does poetic language involve? The word poiesis is of course the root of the answer. This word's first use can be traced at the Symposium, written by Plato around 385–370 b. C., where he describes it as the result of a state of being aware of everything that undergoes. It is not the ‘being aware of’ by itself, but everything responding to it, the reaction to that. In metaphorical words, I could describe it as: the folding and unfolding of the cloth that covers and conforms the universe, creating new paths, new creases which of course, at the same time, will be creating the universe as well, revealing its true feeling and form. Even though Aristotle connected poiesis to the particular craft of producing verses on his Poetics around the 700 b.C., in the early period of the Middle Ages, latin took over the word and branched it into the words: poema meaning poem, an object noun; and poetica, an abstract noun later translated into english as poetics; acknowledging a broader spectrum of possibilities for poetics, poiesis, to be inhabited by the different languages of arts.

In Art as Language (1996)  Hagberg makes a preamble on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (1922) state of affairs, which is no other thing than a neologism to name objects and their relation to each other. Wittgenstein sees language as the mirror  to the world, as the systematic abstraction for those ‘states of affairs’' that conform the world. Langer uses this Theory of Meaning and transposes it for her Theory of Art Meaning. For so, she introduces two modalities of action: discursive and non discursive. A discursive form of art would be a primordial way of apprehending or abstracting the world; by constructing a signifier for a significance; as we would do with spoken and written language on a daily basis or as we would use a certain movement of the head to say different things as: yes, no, or come with me. On the other hand, the nondiscursive meaning bears with the spiritual, mental and emotional aspects that constitute a human life. Another name for it would be expressive meaning, as it takes the information from the inner world of individuals, outwards into any art language: spoken, written or into our case of study, dance language.

It must be recognized that subject perceptions: and therefore ideas, feelings and emotions own a structure, they apply to a system, and consequently, they can be transposed into a symbol and communicated in depth. Langer mentions “an art symbol bears resemblance to the inner feeling through a morphological similarity”(2019: 11) Given that the discussion on the Tractatus is merely written as an exploration and exercise of understanding meaning in linguistic language, it is agreed that langer mentions ‘morphological” referring to its linguistic field of study; the one that analyses the words formation. Nonetheless, I’d like to transpose this word to generate a theory around Dance Meaning. Morphology, inside the field of Biology, refers to the study of the form and the structure of living beings.  As a paraphrase: Embodied poiesis, as an art symbol, resembles the inner feeling of the dancers/poets through their body structure as they originate forms and movement creating a dance an improvised phrase that speaks in a kinetic silent language. In my own words: emotions and ideas breed in our minds through the membrane of our bodies, taking shape and movement while changing our anatomical structure to transfer meaning. With this, I would like to make a recall to the body as our primordial technologie to connect, understand and communicate with the world. 

If you ever tried to learn how to sail or to surf, you probably have heard many times  ‘you have to read the ocean before getting in’. Meaning that you have to learn how to analyse it, even though you're only seeing and then processing that information in order to know if it is safe or not to go into it; this process does not need words. Yet we use the word “read”; perhaps the movement of the waves can not tell us a story, but it can surely provoke emotions and sensations within us. Watching a contemporary dance performance or an improvisation will always be an ambiguous subjective experience, as it is transmitted from one corporeality to another. The closer you are in culture, the closer you'll get to understand what is being transmitted. The movement of the body can be traceable, or it can be not. Even if we all agree to “read” that a circular movement with the head, whilst held by two arms swirling around it, and an open mouth can only be interpreted as being mad (an intellectual state); it could also be interpreted as being completely devastated, blasted (an emotional state); or even, if accompanied it by an spiral movement to the floor, it could resemble a katabasis, a proper odyssey through the river Styx (a narrative abstraction). Body movement, particularly in terms of improvisation, can be understood in terms of human emotion and it can assuredly tell a story, but also it can be narrowed down to pure abstract movement; into a secret and sacred self language, perhaps the purest form of poiesis.

Hagberg (1995) also comments on Collingwood thesis about the alikeness of action that art and language share; to express. On The Principles of Art (1938) Collingwood organises art making (as much as language generation) into two stages: the imaginative state and the expressive state, and he does so through the following quote “What kind of thing must art be, if it is to have the two characteristics of being expressive and imaginative? The answer is: Art must be a language.” (2009:73) Sentio, ergo cogito; our bodies feel to make us aware, and it is through the body as well that we interact and respond to the  knowledge that it has gathered; and then? It will transform into movement, it will build up a phrase across the space that is not only around us, but that space which includes us and transforms us. “Words are too small for me to describe this process, you can’t formulate this because it really belongs to another language altogether. It is all about this other language, which with words you can only try to come close to” (1990, Bausch interviewed in Kirchman TV documentary, translated by Thomas Kampe). 

In the field of Dance, a cognitive movement becomes a cognitive thought through the awareness of the impulses and the decision to follow them. This becomes more visible when one improvised movement is repeated. Why? We may ask. The body needed to say, and the brain allowed it. This cognitive movement response is linked to the cognitive process that deals with the recognition of the impulse itself, the recognition of the motor that started it while sorting out a connection with the next movement. The raw material of an improvisation is merely self expression and definitely not a work of art; Nonetheless, it performs the semiotics links that conform communication. Improvisation can only turn into the field of analytic thinking once the movement is memorised or saved into digital media. By reviewing or re-examining it, we can attach meaning to it. Even Ducasse wonders as he writes “Is this the meaning I was trying to express?” (2009: 54). While researching on his theory of art, Ducasse had to immediately turn to the question about what is language, finding a similar answer to  the one proposed by Collingwood. Ducasse recognizes this first inner emotional sensual state, and then its materialisation into an artistic language. All of you dancers or movement investigators, have you not felt the will of dancing or expressing through the body after an overwhelming experience? At this point, we may agree that poiesis is indeed an artistic language set in action.

The body and its corporeality seem to be irreparable. This concept raised by Giorgino Agamben is used in Valeria A. Briginshaw’s essay Corporeality and Materiality in Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater: Notions of the Irreparable to conceptualise the merging of the essence and the existence that constitute a dancer as a being and as a poet. The notions mentioned before: the imaginative inner state, and outer space for expressiveness are poured into the dancetheatre context under the names of corporeality and materiality. Briginshaw looks at the irreparableness of the poiesis, this ‘other language’ raised by the essence and existence of each individual dancer.  She remarks the openness of the dancers from the Wuppertal, sitting them as a perfect example for the irreparable.  Agamben’s commentaries over spinoza's notion of the irreparable state have two components:  securitas and desperatio, meaning security and desperation correspondingly. Pina’s dancers seem to explore both sides of their experience and transformation as people and poets/dancers during the processes of creation as much as they do in the performances of those explorations. Bauch and the presiding Expressionist movement that started around the early  90s with Mary Wigman took notice of the possibilities of each dancer to pursue a vocabulary of their own. A language generated by nothing else than themselves and their experiences in movement and in communication with their context. The body will always be both: a sign and a symbol, as it is constantly saying. Whilst writing with their open body, with their irremediable way of creating, the artist of the expressionist movement succeeded in communicating the unsayable with their audiences.There is not a proper translation for it into a narrative sustained by words; but it creates a language on itself, understandable, transmittable, so far untranslatable.

These conversations about corporeality and materiality, and all the themes that compound them as the spiritual and phenomenological aspects that a dancer/poet has and experiences triggered this question. Why do we dance?Why do I dance? I do it because I want to exceed the limitations of Western thought, discourse and language, regardless of my sincere love for literature; because it makes me understand myself when I have no linguistic outcome. If Wittgenstein, the philosopher, and Pizzarnik, the poet, could have led their quest into their bodies they would have found the answer. Contemporary dance improvisation embodies poetry, therefore a poetic language which will not be traceable by our linguistic brain, but definitely by all of our remaining senses. The message transmitted by the body, by the expectation or creation of an embodied poem will stay in the memory of all we are: flesh, mind and spirit.

Poetic language is always a proposition of philosophy. Poetics, all that comes after the practice of poiesis is a resignification. Poiesis seems to be the information and energy that overgrows inside the body and the extension that allows it to be poured out. It grows inside us, but it can only be in because there is an outside which we affect and which has affected us. It feels like the artificious process of finding a true self language by tearing down the walls of the self and the conventional language, making presence (in terms of perception) and identity become part of the where and the what we inhabit as much as we allow the outside to reside within us; not reflecting one another, but refracting one another, always ever changing.

If we can see and feel such communication, our conception of the world changes. A tree is not  only a tree, but it is also the air I breathe. In metaphor but later understood through a calculative vision, we can see the poetic in nature, and therefore, in us. If we can reach that vision that transforms your perception and makes you see yourself as poetry, how would you be transformed? Why is poetry vitally important? (Ru, 2015). 

Briginshaw, V., and Ramsay Burt. Writing Dancing Together, Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central. Available at: http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/roehampton-ebooks/detail.action?docID=485301.

BLACKOUT ((poetry & politics)) (no date) Rimbaud | The Letters (1870-1872). Available at: https://my-blackout.com/2019/03/03/arthur-rimbaud-letters-1870-18719-sean-bonney-letter-on-poetics-after-rimbaud/  (Accessed: 20 April 2022)

Hampton, T. (2015) Absolutely Modern: Dylan, Rimbaud, and Visionary Song. Available at: http://journals.mountaintopuniversity.edu.ng/English%20Language/Absolutely%20Modern-%20Dylan,%20Rimbaud,%20and%20Visionary%20Song.pdf

Hagberg, G.L. (1998) Art as language : Wittgenstein, meaning, and aesthetic theory. Cornell University Press. UK.

Lina, R. (2015) “Why is poetry vitally important?,” Being Poetry. Revealing a Poetical Vision, September, 2015[Blog]. Available at http://beingpoetry.com/inquiry/why-is-poetry-vitally-important/

Marranca, B. (1996) Ecologies of Theatre. The Johns Hopkin University Press. London

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions. Available at https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf

Wigman, M. (1966) The Language of Dance. Wesleyan University. London. UK