The Artistic Connotation and Expression Logic of Choreography Creation from the Perspective of Body Narrative

Abstract

Choreography as a creative practice that produces meaning through the ordering of bodily movement in time and place is a different sort of story whose logic of expression cannot be adequately theorised within the frames worked out for language or literary narrative. This study addresses the logic of creative expression and the creative connotation of dance production from the perspective of body narrative. The choreographic body is not only a narrative subject, but also a narrative medium and a narrative text. This paper analyses four dimensions of body narrative in choreography, drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body, Mark Johnson's theory of embodied meaning and image schemata and Susan Leigh Foster's semiotics of choreographic representation. The pre-reflective kinaesthetic dimension, the image-schematic dimension, the compositional-structural dimension and the inter-corporeal dimension of performer-audience kinaesthetic empathy. In this paper I explore the logics of expression specific to the choreographic practice that choreographers employ to construct narratives that cannot be translated into verbal or visual equivalents. I analyse the Tanztheater of Pina Bausch and the deconstructive choreographic practice of William Forsythe, embodied metaphor, temporal folding, corporeal counterpoint, and spatial dramaturgy. The study then goes on to situate these logics of expression within the broader theoretical dilemma of how to account for non-verbal art-making as a legitimate and culturally distinctive mode of telling tales about the world.