Semiotic and Rhetorical Patterns in Dance and Gestural Languages by Nicoleta Popa Blanariu

The body is the crossroad of the biological and cultural (representational) experience of human being. It has a basic rhetoric potential, which is exploited, in various cultures, through’s concept of “orientation metaphor”, able to transpose certain concepts into space, as well as Fontanier’s“metonymies of the physical”, or Greimas’s “metonymic actors” identified in the bodily segments and acting each “in the name of an actant” (Greimas). Therefore, the body is an “expressive space” (Merleau-Ponty), the symbolic value of its segments being deeply involved in choreographic significations.

Key-words: gestural language, orientation metaphor (Lakoff & Johnson), metonymies of the physical (Fontanier), metonymic actors (Greimas), verbal/ non verbal communication, dance.