Naming Movement: Nomenclature and Ways of Knowing Dance

Abstract

This study examines dance terminologies and documentation of Korean and French court dances, Jeongjae and Belle Dance, respectively. For Belle Dance, Raoul Feuillet's Chorégraphie (1700) and Pierre Rameau's Maître à Danser (1725) provide lists of movement terms, definitions of them, and instructions for how to enact them. For Jeongjae, Jeongjae mudo holgi, written in the nineteenth century, comprises diagrams and descriptions of dance movements. These sources have their own ways of converting dance movement into language, revealing the divergent perspectives toward body movement in each culture. Their divergent modes of documenting dance demonstrate the characteristic ways of expressing and constructing knowledge of body movement of their historical and cultural contexts. By comparing the terminologies and documentation that carry historically and culturally specific concepts, I explore underlying assumptions about what kinds of information are considered knowledge and preserved through articulation in words and graphic symbols. This study addresses the research question, what do dance terminologies and processes of documentation suggest about perspectives on dance movement in two distinct dance cultures. To articulate the differences, this study examines selected documents as a whole and dance terms in specific. The significance of characteristic features found in the textual analysis will be illuminated through an exploration of intertextual relationships between the dance texts and important sources of the period that focus on the body and how it is conceived in relation to the human being. This study suggests that, dance documents, which translate selected aspects of dance movement into words and graphic symbols, encapsulate historically and culturally specific ways of knowing dance movement. Intending to capture movement analytically and visually, Belle Dance treatises attempt to establish objective knowledge of dance. This mode of knowing corresponds to philosophical and practical milieus that constructed the theory of mind-body dualism, mathematical foundations of modern science, and reliance on sense perceptions. In contrast, Jeongjae documents take the performer's experience as the standard point of view, considering his or her inner experience as well as observable results of movement. Correspondingly, Korean traditional culture adhered to a holistic view of the body and promoted implicit expressions to describe body movements.