Letters 2 Dance

Abstract

In a danced analysis of the alphabet, the dancer and choreo­grapher Femke Gyselinck investi­gates the relati­onship between movement and typography, dance and the shape of letters. The produc­tion is a choreo­graphic extension of Gymnastics of the Mind (2020), a research project inspired by the book ABECEDA (1926). That resulted in her own dance alphabet that will also appear as a publica­tion in the summer of 2021.

In a choreo­graphy for three dancers, the dance describes the space, and the double meaning of ‘letters’ is played out to the full: both an alphabe­tical character and a message. How do you dance from letters to words, from a word to a sentence? What is the syntax of a dance phrase? The starting point is a delibe­rate mission impossible: precisely by grafting dance vocabu­lary onto the princi­ples of language in the narrow sense, the choreo­grapher highlights the specifi­city of dance all the more clearly. Musician and composer Liesa Van der Aa joins the dancers on stage. The ordering of letters and her musical samples go hand in hand; the dance leads the music and creates a fabric of dancing together, speaking together, listening together. Conver­sely, the musical composi­tion helps to determine the choreo­graphic writing. Letters 2 Dance invites the viewer to partici­pate in a game of deciphering, with the language of dance in a constant tension between expres­sion and abstrac­tion.