ABSTRACT
Dance education offers access to the decoding of movement through verbal and kinesthetic language. Verbal language is comprised of specific dance vocabularies, while kinesthetic language might comprise one's own internal sensations, perceptions, and responses to dance, including bodily or somatic knowledge, which includes the ways people make meaning of the world through their bodily experiences. Verbal and kinesthetic languages both contribute significantly to one's ability to respond to dance. In the act of responding to dance performance, the dancer or consumer calls upon prior experiences and understandings to construct meaning, which in turn inform how he/she responds to a given dance work. A response might be as simple and unstandardized as like or dislike, as commonly practiced in popular social media, or it can involve knowledgeable processes and reasoning based on informed practice. This chapter also presents how one teacher, Ms. Layton, introduces choreographic text to a class of beginners with limited vocabularies for discussing dance.
