Social Dancing Has A Sign System

Social dancing can be considered a language—a way for people to communicate and have a conversation through movement. When two people dance together, they are engaged in a dialogue, expressing ideas, responding to each other, and creating meaning together in real time. This conversation happens not through words, but through the physical language of dance.

This perspective leads us naturally to semiotics, the study of signs and meaning. Linguistics is the study of spoken and written language, and semiotics is the higher abstraction of that. Ferdinand de Saussure's foundational work, the Course in General Linguistics (published posthumously in 1916), established the framework for applying linguistic analysis to all systems of signs, not just verbal language. In the classical semiotic sense, social dancing operates through a process of semiosis—the process by which signs convey meaning. Social dancing has its own sign system, and each social dance form has its own sets of signs and meanings. Learning to dance is learning the signs, the movements, and the mapping between the two of these things from the prespective of the role you are playing in the dance.

Take partner dancing as an example, where there is a leader and a follower. The leader has the movements they want the follower to do in their mind, the signs they can express during the dance to the follower, and the ability to map desired movements to expressed signs. The follower must observe the signs from the leader, map these signs back to movements, and execute the movements themselves. There is then a feedback cycle of the leader observing follower execution and their own communication that informs the leader's next movements and signs.

This can be generalized further, like in line dances and Rueda de Casino, where there are callers and dancers. The callers have phrases they shout out verbally to the dancers, the dancers must observe the signs from the caller, map these signs back to movements, and execute the movements themselves (typically as pairs of leaders and followers). The feedback cycle happens again between the caller and the dancers, with the caller watching to see if the dancers are understanding, executing and enjoying the moves that have been called out.

Contact improvisation is another example of a social dance form, where there are many dancers, and they are free to move around the space and interact with each other, without leading and following roles necessarily. The dancers make bids to each other about what could happen next and other dancers observe and react to those bids to create new movements and interactions.

Learning to social dance then is picking the role within the dance form and learning three things and their interplay from your chosen role:

1. expressing and/or recognizing the signs of the dance form's sign system,
2. executing the movements of the dance form of your chosen role,
3. creating a conversation between yourself and others through the dance form's sign system and movements.