Let's Dance

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Last night we saw Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella, a great retelling of the classic story along with the delightful twists that Matthew Bourne is renown for. Again I was transfixed by the ease in which dance can be some completely narrative – to be sure, staging, set design, and music all played a role in this endeavor but all of them without the use of words.

This got me thinking me thinking again about a few of my recent musings, one being the role of language in Philosophy, the other that of narrative. So often philosophy is steeped in language, and specifically the language of words and definitions, indeed there is even a philosophy of language that strives to eliminate many of the problems of philosophy by creating a precise and unambiguous language. The question this sparks in me is whether philosophy can exist without language – or more precisely, can philosophy exist without words?

So with Matthew Bourne and the ballet fresh in my mind I wonder if one could create a dance version of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, or Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. Furthermore what would that dance look like? I know you can tell a story in dance, is philosophy just another story?

A quick trip to the internet reveals this Ted Talk by John Bohannon, who has encouraged scientists to use dance to express their ideas in a program called Dance your PhD. All I need now I a willing choreographer. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave might be an easy start, or even the Trolley Problem. Perhaps this idea is not so outlandish after all?

Which brings me back to narrative, or more precisely the primacy of narrative. Perhaps language exists in order to tell our stories. That’s probably too broad a stroke; there are things we need to communicate outside a story – presumably. But even if I want to tell someone that it is raining, there is still seems to be a narrative context implied: you should prepare yourself by taking an umbrella, that your picnic is now ruined, that you’ll have to stay indoors.

Perhaps it's just a neurological quirk of our brains, that while we can focus on a fact, it rarely does so without placing it in a context of how we might use it, fight it, hide it, or otherwise use it to our advantage in advancing our own personal narratives. Those are thoughts for another day.

Let’s Dance

We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.

   - Friedrich Nietzsche