[abernard1]

I enjoy the attempt to analyze the dancing (really choreography). But I'm surprised that in this new world of LLM hype not one word in there was dedicated to what dance really is: a language.

Dance is a physical, kinesthetic language.

And to riff on some of the posters, it's this expression and communication between the dancers that makes dancing worth dancing. There's also the social communication between the group, cultural "dialects" and "accents" (on1 vs on2, stylings, etc.)

I began dancing when I realized there was an entire spectrum of the senses closed off to me from overthinking. Besides the specifics of "body language," good dancers can convey intense amounts of emotion. I met someone who could "talk" to me for hours and she never needed to say a word. While the poster attempts to represent dancing in terms of a symbolic language, I'd recommend anyone interested in dance to also try the opposite: realize the physicality is the language and medium of expression. It's more fun, and I promise you your style of thinking will enlarge and grow.

[matheist]

Agree. I think the approach in TFA is like trying to analyze, say, improv comedy via a context-free grammar for English. There might be something there, in the syntax, but it misses a huge amount of semantics and paralanguage.

[abernard1]

Yeah. While I'm sympathetic to the attempt to formalize the representation, there's a psychology to this that a lot of people in tech seem to miss when I see them dancing.

The reasoning goes: "if I understand and represent this choreography properly, I will be better at the activity of dance." Dancing, for them, is the end result of understanding a representation and then doing it.

But the psychological shift is "if I understand my emotions and body properly, I will be able to use the representation of dance to convey that." While dance obviously needs a backing vocabulary of basics and moves, great dancers accidentally come up with better dance moves because their body mechanics combined with the dance's structure, musicality, and emotion constrain what they do. They—and I'm going to use this word intentionally—literally think and communicate through dancing. To use your phrasing, the "semantic" meaning of the dance is their emotions: the actual activity of dance is simply the representational outlet for that.

When you're with a good dancer, your brain shuts off but you're still stuck within the aforementioned set of constraints. And that's when the magic happens. That's when you actually start speaking. That's when your improvised move is the only way you could have possibly said what you wanted to say.

[knuckleheads]

I didn't include it in this version of the post, but I do view dancing as a language and I think it's useful to do so. Every dance is a conversation between two people, with cues and signals following back and forth the whole time. I explicitly don't think about this choreographed dancing, I am primarily interested in analyzing improvised social dancing between two people. I've found a lot of stuff that I'll try to write about soon via way of metaphor by just applying the tools of linguistics and semiotics to social dancing. For example, the idea of a phonetic inventory composed of the ways that people move during the various social dances and styles makes a lot of sense. The small ways that people move their bodies in Cuban Salsa are different are different from LA Salsa, but they are more similar to each other than the way that people move when dancing Zouk or Tango. The tilted head in Zouk and the torsion in Tango feel like the rolled R of some Spanish dialects. Once I have something more concrete I'll try and post about it.