Personal Intersections of Dance and Language Alice Blumenfeld
Studying ancient Greek at NYU solidified my fascination with language and translation. I spent hours memorizing the vocabulary and writing out the forms of words over and over, then translating short phrases—which felt more like solving math problems than interpreting, as I worked out which words related to each other based on their forms. The complexity of ancient Greek amazed me. I no longer remember the forms or much of the vocabulary, yet I hold on to my excitement towards language, to the act of translating, and even more so, to how the structures of our languages form, and at time limit, our thoughts. I see dance as an equally complex language, but without words, and in my experience it relies heavily on metaphors to be able to express anything at all. During my time at NYU, I had my first experiences with contemporary dance after years of ballet and flamenco, taking classes at Dance New Amsterdam with Laurie DeVito. I loved going to these classes, not just for DeVito’s style of movement and to expand my movement vocabulary, but also for the metaphors she would invent to transmit the intention of the movements. I remember one metaphor in which she asked us to imagine we were a tube of lipstick rising up in a spiral; other metaphors came with stories from her own experiences. There was one from when she worked as a waitress and a customer asked for a “Quicky Lauren” (instead of a Quiche Lorraine) and she could not figure out what the customer ordered; this anecdote showed what happens when you don’t clearly “annunciate” the steps, and the story to accompany that idea made the concept more palpable. Other metaphors came from basic human experiences—a pose with our legs crossed as if we desperately had to use the bathroom, for example. After understanding her metaphor, and applying it to the steps, I felt I could interpret the movement; I could go further than simply carrying out the gestures as mechanical exercises and could give the steps meaning, or in other words, really dance. In my experience, the best dance directors use metaphors to create their work (I am not referring to a central metaphor, though that may also be true.) As a young dancer, I took a workshop with Alonzo King, founder and director of Lines Ballet in San Francisco. Along with his ingenious choreographic ideas, he uses words to bring out the best in each dancer. Images, descriptions, and metaphors saturated his classes. During the first combination at the barre, he suddenly stopped the music in order to explain with great detail the movements of the arm during a plié; he had us imagine we were touching a fur coat, then moving through honey, and then to experiment on our own with different images behind the 51