MARTOR no. 30 / year 2025
DOI: https://doi.org/10.57225/Martor.2025.02
AUTHOR:
Csilla Könczei
“Babeș-Bolyai” University, Romania
PAGES: 16-41
KEYWORDS: Body-mind unity; articulatory phonology; syllable; transgressing structuralism; evolutionary dance anthropology; kinetography Laban; “kinemology.”
ABSTRACT:
After the corporeal turn, the unity of mind and body has been recognized by many. This includes articulatory phonology, which no longer views phonemes as static, disembodied units, but brings in a gesture-based approach, conceiving the articulation of sounds as sound-producing speech movements, or articulatory gestures. This recognition makes it possible to search for closer analogies between spoken language and dance. From this perspective, abstract knowledge and bodily action in dance and speech are nothing but interconnected endpoints of a body-mind continuum, which shape and reshape each other being impacted by the individual differences, imperfections, innovations, and lapses in memory, occurring during the processes of production and perception. I argue here that there might be substrata in dances are built of “primitive units” comparable to the phonological structure of speech, due to the body-mind unity of sensing and controlling. To demonstrate that the articulation of sounds is based on principles similar to how movements are generated in some dances, I present the example of a traditional dance from Romania, Alunelu înfundat.
HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE:
Könczei, Csilla. 2025. “Can We Find Reason in Dance? Embodied Thought: Exploring Analogies Between Dance and Speech Articulation.” Martor 30, 16-41. [DOI: 10.57225/Martor.2025.02]
*
MARTOR applies to all published materials the Creative Commons Licence “Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives CC BY-NC-ND,” allowing others to download the published works and share them with others as long as they credit the author, but they can’t change them in any way, or use them commercially.