Marioenrico D'Angelo

«Nature is a temple where living pillars sometimes emit confused words»
Charles Baudelaire, «Correspondences», in The Flowers of Evil

In his next choreographic research, Marioenrico D’Angelo, together with performers Angela Demattè and Edoardo Brovardi, will be focusing on the concept of natural meaning and its importance in dance.

The philosopher of language Paul Grice distinguished two kinds of meaning. The first is «conventional» or «unnatural» meaning: this is the sort of meaning words acquire in a language. For example, when I say «I’m hungry», this particular string of signs and sounds has, in and of itself, nothing to do with the state of my body; the words are connected to what they mean only by convention. The second kind of meaning, however, is what Grice calls «natural meaning». Imagine that you are out on a walk, for example: you see smoke on the horizon, and you take the smoke as a sign that the forest is burning. In nature, smoke means fire, and this association between the sign and its meaning holds independently of any conventions. It does not matter what culture I grew up in or what language I speak: as long as I am a member of the human species who shares with you the same evolutionary history, smoke will mean fire for me just as much as it will for you.

Our body is a piece of nature, and nature is imbued with natural meaning. In modern society, however, we are pervasively surrounded by conventional meaning. Dance is, more than any other art, the domain in which, through the sophisticated use of bodily movement, natural meaning is celebrated and elevated to its greatest heights. Dancing, and watching dance, is a way to become more fluent in the language of nature, and indeed excel at it, when the dance is excellent. Truths concerning our physical and natural selves, which we had forgotten or suppressed, are presented to us in the most powerful, surprising, and artful of ways.

Of course, natural meaning has its limits, and dance is especially prone to playing with them. We are linguistic creatures after all, and as such we will continuously feel the urge to reinterpret our experience of dance and translate it into words. We will try to superimpose conventional meaning onto natural meaning, and translate one into the other.

Although dance has the power to reach what is speechless, natural, and universal, when we superimpose conventional language and translate its content into words, it will speak of different things to different people. This is not only beautiful, but also valuable: it gives us a solid and universal starting point while also pressing us to share our own individual, diverse perspectives as well as to appreciate the beauty, and the enriching nature, of disagreement. Among all the arts, perhaps only poetry matches dance in this capacity to layer meaning onto meaning, and to speak of different things to different people, all at the same time, by relying only on a relatively sparse number of signs. After all, as Baudelaire’s poem reminds us, nature’s meaning is itself sometimes confused: it is not univocal, least of all when we are dealing with such highly complex natural phenomena as our bodies and their emotions, and it is at bottom this which supports the rich diversity of interpretation.

Marioenrico D’Angelo will be in residence at Dampfzentrale Bern from 25. to 29. of August.  On Tuesday, 26. August at 18:00 there will be a showing of Marioenricos current work.