Dance is a conversation the body conducts. But what if you don’t understand this language? The secret isn’t in knowing the names of movements. The secret is in learning to read emotions in space.
Forget about technique. Yes, this sounds sacrilegious to dance schools! But real dance begins where learnedness ends. Watch butoh—Japanese dance of darkness, where dancers move like ghosts. No technique, only soul turning itself inside out. Or contact improvisation, where partners communicate through the weight of their bodies.
Imagine: a dancer freezes mid-movement. The viewer thinks: “Mistake!” And the dancer creates a pause—a moment when energy gathers before explosion. In dance, statics is more important than dynamics. Martha Graham said: “Dance is the hidden language of the soul made visible.”
Books are your dance dictionary. Reading “Anna Karenina,” you follow the heroine’s inner experiences. In dance, every gesture is an internal monologue transferred into movement. Detective stories teach noticing details—in dance, every trifle matters: head tilt, finger curve, breathing.
Here’s the strangeness: to understand Merce Cunningham’s contemporary dance, it’s helpful to read… abstract poetry! Yes, exactly abstract. His dances don’t tell stories—they create moods, like Gertrude Stein’s poems. Meaning is born not in logic, but in sensations.
Listen to silence between movements. Dance has the concept of “negative space”—air that the dancer doesn’t fill with movement, but which also “dances.” Look not only at the body, but at the emptiness around it. Sometimes the most beautiful is what isn’t there.
Skeptics will object: “Contemporary dance is chaos! Where’s the beauty of classical ballet?” But they don’t understand: beauty comes in different forms. Flamenco is pain that became dance. Breakdancing is rebellion against gravity. Each style speaks in its own language of emotions.
Read aloud—this is choreography for voice. When you change speech rhythm, make pauses, speed up or slow down tempo, you create a dance of words. Every intonation is movement in the space of sound. “The Buzzing Fly” in your performance is a rhythm lesson for a little one.
Amazing fact: children who are read to expressively better feel rhythm and musicality. The brain learns to perceive temporal structures—the basis of any dance. Reading a fairy tale, the parent becomes conductor of childhood imagination.
Don’t try to understand the plot. Not all dances tell stories. Sometimes dance is simply joy of movement, like children on a playground. Avant-garde choreographer Yvonne Rainer created “task dances”—dancers simply performed simple actions: walking, sitting, passing objects. And it was brilliant.
Pay attention to the dancer’s breathing. Breathing is the invisible thread connecting all movements. In Eastern dances, like kathak or bharatanatyam, breathing is the basis of expressiveness. Western viewers don’t notice this, which is unfortunate.
Watch interaction with space. The dancer doesn’t just move—they sculpt space with their body. High jumps expand the vertical. Low floor movements explore the horizontal. Spirals create volume. Every movement is sculpture in time.
Another secret: the best dance appreciators grew up in families where they read a lot. Why? Books develop the ability to perceive multilayeredness. In good dance, several actions happen simultaneously: a story is told, emotions are expressed, form is explored.
Modern neuroscience discovered: reading activates the same brain areas as observing movement. Mirror neurons make us “dance” along with the dancer. Reading a book to a child, you’re preparing them for empathetic perception of dance.
Don’t fear the strange. Dance constantly evolves. Vogue was born in New York gay clubs, imitating model poses. Krump expresses the pain of urban outskirts. Each generation creates its own dance language. What seems strange today may become classic tomorrow.
Close your eyes for a minute during a performance. Listen to how dance sounds: stomping feet, rustling costumes, dancers’ breathing. Dance can not only be seen but heard. Then open your eyes—and see movement completely anew.
Study cultural context. Tango is dialogue between man and woman, born in the port quarters of Buenos Aires. Irish steps are protest against the ban on traditional music. Dance always reflects the history and soul of a people.
Most importantly—remember that dance is universal. A baby rocks to music rhythm before learning to walk. This is a language understood by all, regardless of education and culture. Movement is our first way of communicating with the world.
Books prepare for this understanding best of all. Every fairy tale is a little dance of words, every character moves through pages with their special gait. Read to children every day, read rhythmically, with movement in your voice. Because every reading is rehearsal before the great dance of life, where every person is a dancer telling their story through movements of the heart. And who knows, perhaps it’s thanks to “Little Red Riding Hood,” told with dance in voice, that your child will someday see in any movement—from ballet pas to children’s play—manifestation of the human soul seeking ways to express the inexpressible.