Meaning construal in contemporary dance

This paper aims at illustrating the role of conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor in the meaning construal of the philosopher Alan Watts’s “The Beauty of Nothingness” by the Portuguese choreographer and dancer Tiago Coelho. As Irene Mittelberg (2019Mittelberg, I. (2019). Visuo-kinetic signs are inherently metonymic: How embodied metonymy motivates forms, functions, and schematic patterns in gesture. Frontiers in Psychology, 101, Article 254. : 10) claims: “Generally speaking, there are innumerable latent contiguity relations out there in the world, in our imagination, and in our embodied knowledge structures that may be operationalized when we are reasoning and communicating.” In line with this perspective, the research presented here will focus on the contiguity relations between the dancer’s internal world and his communication of the world described by Watts. I fully endorse Mark Johnson’s (2007)Johnson, M. (2007). The meaning of the body: Aesthetics of human understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. claim that aesthetics lies at our very capacity to make meaning and that art is simply an exemplary manifestation of this ability. As he points out, humans are sentient beings, explorers of space, other entities, their inner life. In line with these ideas, the present analysis of the contemporary dance choreography is an attempt at approaching the choreographer’s exemplary manifestation of meaning making as well as describing the underlying resources, which he as a human being has and puts at the service of his own construal as well as the construal that reaches the audience via his body.