Metonymy In Dance

When one watches a dancer leap or glide across a stage, the observer’s thoughts may not immediately be directed towards the metaphoric implications of each movement, but these metaphoric processes operate as a fundamental characteristic of dance. Physical gestures are an innate characteristic of the way people communicate with each other as they “…can reveal aspects of meaning that are not, or even cannot, be present in words alone” (Kövecses 72). Dance, at its simplest definition, is but an exaggeration of these human gestures; the choreographer can manipulate the movement presented to the audience to ensure the successful communication of ideas without words. While the absence of words can be a powerful tool on stage, it creates challenges …show more content…
Blom and Chaplin now need to instruct the dancer on how they can structure their movements into an ordered piece of choreography that communicates their overarching concept to the audience. They explain this process, which they describe as phrasing, by relating the desired framework for the phrase to that framework of prose. Specifically, they create mappings between the progression of a plot to the chronological progression of the movement within a phrase. Blom and Chaplin stress that a choreographic phrases needs what they call a high point: a moment that is “…marked by extreme change…” and resembles “…the instant when tilt becomes fall…” (Blom and Chaplin 24). As they further describe the rise, high point, and tilt, they interchange these words with the terms rising action, climax and falling action, respectively. While Blom and Chaplin use these terms to explain the progression of moments in the choreography, these words are most well-known as the components of Freytag’s Pyramid: a model demonstrates the plot of a literary work (“Analyzing a Story 's Plot: Freytag 's Pyramid”). By drawing on this model of prose to describe the model one should consider for choreography, Blom and Chaplin take two seemingly separate domains and place them in one universal ICM, storytelling. Establishing this metonymic relationship allows Blom and Chaplin to use elements of prose as vehicle entities for the target entity of the structure of a choreographic phrase. They apply this relationship not only to explain the progression of the movement, but also to explain other components of the phrase’s composition. For instance, when discussing the use of a sudden exhalation as a tool of expression, they say that doing so finishes the movement with “… an exclamation point at the instant of the