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To what extent is dance a language?


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hey.

my friend and i are doing our tok presentation and need help on it because we are very confused!! :/

we are doing "To what extent is dance a language?"

our teacher told us to be analytical, to use tok terms. we need to work on language and perception.

our examples for are:

~ So you think you can dance

~an indian love story

how these communicate

against:

~krumping (in dance you can't communicate sentences of a message)

thank you in advance for any help on ow we can approach this question!! :)

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Krumping is also dance though, just a different style. I would advise you to not compare different dance styles, but rather dancing and art. Might be better to even go more specific, for example ballet vs. poetry.

I do not agree with what you say: "in dance you can't communicate sentences of a message." Dance reveals messages, not written, but visual. You can get into the meaning and the way of expressing communication, saying that dancing reveals body language and spoken language is just spoken language. In dance you can communicate both sentences and fragments depending on the move made and the break between moves.

You need to narrow down your topic A LOT. But the general idea is really nice, although dance might be difficult to analyze if you or your partner are not dancers. But I assume you are, judging from your nickname and the topic choice. :)

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I love the idea :) and I think dance does communicate sentances of a message. One of my favorite So you think you can dance performances is called "Dancing by Elisa" by Lacey and Kameron. It definitely articulated the message behind the dance. You can argue that body language is even more important than verbal language. One idea is to take the saying "actions speak louder than words" and argue that it not only applies in the sense we put it in, but it also applies in the literal sense. What you can also do is bring a very abstract contemporary performance and make a certain number of people watch it and then ask them about their own analysis of the meaning behind it and then compare the results to see how similar they are. The results could be similar which proves that Dance is a language, or they could be different which would prove that it's not as effective a means of communication as verbal language is. Both ways it would be useful. However, make sure that the performance is VERY abstract so you don't get an argument that, "well it was obvious"

Hope this helped :) if I get more ideas I'll let you know

Good luck !

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  • 1 month later...

As a matter of fact, the human mind is more likely to read someone's body language than to actually listen to what someone says. Unknowingly our mind translates certain expressions into the way we listen and react to/with people.

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