The late Professor Collingwood claimed that the dance is the mother of all languages in the sense that every kind or order of language (speech, gesture, and so forth) is an offshoot from an original language of total bodily gesture; a language which we all use, whether aware of it or not—even to stand perfectly still, no less than making a movement, is in the strict sense a gesture. He also relates the dance to the artist's language of form and shape. He asks us to imagine an artist who wants to reproduce the emotional effect of a ritual dance in which the dancers trace a pattern on the ground. The emotional effect of the dance depends not on any instantaneous posture, but on the traced pattern. Obviously, he concludes, the sensible thing would be to leave out the dancers altogether, and draw the pattern by itself.
Profesorowi Witoldowi Wołodkiewiczowi (1929–2021) in memoriam
