Learning the Languages of the Body: Dance as a Language

I’ve perhaps met a hundred people in the past 1.5 months!

(If you haven't noticed already, this year is and will be FAST! Get ready!)

When people find out I’m a polyglot (if you're new around here, I speak 8 languages fluently), they sometimes get curious. The other day I was asked if I'm currently planning to learn a new language.

Language learning has been an important and constant part of my life that I can't negate for the past 20 years. I get restless every time I think about understanding Japanese, hear a Portuguese song or meet a speaker of Romanian, Arabic, Greek or another language I’ve toyed with in the past!

So I was surprised to hear myself that no, I wasn’t really planning on learning a new language right now.

“I want to learn the languages of the body now!” I felt inspired to respond.

I’ve been learning how to dance bachata for a month now.

Funnily, I’ve actually always wanted to learn salsa and once I realized that Colombia was a great place to do it, I decided to double down on that dream. It is by chance - which I wasn’t bothered to interfere with, haha! - that I started learning bachata instead!

Now that I’m invested in bachata, I decided not to confuse myself with salsa at this point. Though having a taste of what's available has awakened a desire to master all the different dance languages, one by one! Salsa, bachata, zouk, kizomba, tango..!

I learned languages because I wanted to be able to communicate with their speakers and experience their unique ways of thinking and expressing themselves most authentically, i.e., in their mother tongues.

Dance, too, allows one to feel how different dancers express themselves differently, as well as how they desire for diverse things to be expressed and experienced through their dance.

I’m now slowly exploring these perceptions: just like when learning a language, the first attempts to communicate are clumsy, mechanical, heady. You don’t feel or notice the flow of conversation because you’re stuck in your logical brain desperately trying to put one building block atop another. Your mind is so preoccupied with getting it right that, as a result, you are totally self-absorbed: so utterly pleased with yourself when you don't mess up and get that sentence out or do that turn smoothly! Yay!

I find it frustrating. But luckily, I’ve always been too tempted by the vision of being able to nonchalantly converse with strangers in fluent Mandarin/bachata to be discouraged by the sheer embarrassment of realizing that I had insulted someone (French), said I was horny instead of excited (French again) or punched a guy in the face (bachata)! 😅