Words are never enough

I'm thinking a lot about the expressiveness of the body and how we marginalize it today. We live in a world that relies almost exclusively on text for communication, using the written (more and more frequently electronically transmitted) word much more frequently than face-to-face communication. How many times have you have been introduced to someone that you have been communicating with for months, or years, and you say, "finally, I get to put a face to a name"?

Yet, the body is our master communicator. Have you ever had the experience of hearing what someone is saying but, when, observing their body, seeing that what they are feeling is very different from what they are saying? We have the wonderful saying in English, "the body never lies". The body has a direct line to our emotional self in a way that words rarely do. The body expresses what and how we feel, and mostly against our volition. That is part of the power of dance--it can give direct expression to our emotional experience of the world in a much more direct and visceral way than words ever can. Words process emotion through an intellectual operation that separates them from the immediacy of experience. It intellectualizes experience and requires a self-reflective faculty that comments on experience, rather than communicating that experience directly. Language can be useful to help clarify "what" you feel, but what you encapsulate in language in not feeling, but only a mediated reflection of feeling. I know that I have had occasions when I have experienced a powerful emotion, but, until I examine it in language (either through conversation with another or writing (conversation with myself)) I am unable to name the emotion. In naming it, I crystallize it, but I also reduce it to a finite category that may not, in fact, be sufficiently capacious to contain all of that experience. I always wonder what happens to the emotion that escapes language? This sounds like the type of speculation Borges specialized in, what happens to those emotions that lurk outside the boundary of the rational mind? There is food for thought here.

Working as choreographer on a production of Tennessee Williams' "Summer and Smoke" I was struck by how (overly) dependent the actors and director were on the text. As a dancer, I felt the need to bring the body into the play, so to speak. I was very happy with what the short dance I choreographed added to the character who danced it and to her interactions with the other actor on stage. But that was only a few minutes out of a 2 hour-plus production. The over-reliance on the play's text limited what the actors were able to communicate. So often the physical expression of the characters was reduced to repetitive tics or a particular way of walking, as if that exhausted the physical dimension of the character. In fact, text should be the tip of the iceberg. Text should be what is added to what the body expresses, not the other way around. I wonder how it would have been for the actors and director if they had worked in rehearsal on communicating what the lines said, without uttering a single word? If they had understood the emotional dimension of their characters and the plot, apart from language, might that not have added a deep resonance to the production? If emotion and the body are powerfully communicating to an audience, there is hardly the need for words. I have learned a great deal about this by speaking foreign languages over the years. Many times I have had the experience that there are just some people that I converse with better than with others. Yet, my language skills, in terms of vocabulary, grammar and accent, are equal in each instance. How can this be? I believe that when we make a deep emotional and spiritual connection to others, our language communication skills seem to increase exponentially. The difference in my ability to communicate with different individuals seems to boil down to the level of non-verbal communication. That is why speaking on the telephone is such a nightmare for foreign speakers, especially in your early attempts to speak the language. You have no visual cues to guide you nor to pick up the slack for insufficient language ability on your part. All you have are your words, and it is immediately apparent how much is communicated apart from those words. So, the next time you rely exclusively on words to communicate, as I am here, be aware of the inherent limitation that is built into your communication. You may be saying far less than you think you are.