Choreography
The term choreography usually evokes an image of dance and any dancing form associated with music. Mélanie Morrissette discusses about the absence or ignorance of discourse and film criticism on choreography in martial arts films. My works in sign language arts also inspect the notion of choreography in sign language.
Lip Dancing by Jolanta Lapiak at www.lapiak.com
The video Lip Dancing I created in the spring of 2003 contains the visual-manual speaker myself and the vocal-auditory speaker. It has no audio. One of the common comments I inevitably received in critique at an art college was that my signing was like "hand dancing" in their words. Initially, I was provoked, but with further thinking I finally came up with the title for this video "Lip Dancing". It brought me to thinking further about what "dance" means and how it relates to language and what choreography actually can do.
In the summer of 2003, I saw a videotape of Eric Malzkuhn who translated Lewis Carroll's poem "The Jabberwocky" into ASL. He did not simply stand and tell the poetic story in ASL within the head to waist frame. Rather, he performed it beautifully. What I noticed a striking thing about his performance was that he did not only use language but also used choreographic aspect in his performance. He fluently moved around with his whole body and the way he moved his legs in harmony with the way he uttered words in ASL in manual-visual-kinetic space-time.
Zone Upside Down by Jolanta Lapiak, www.lapiak.com
In 2004, I took a private lesson in Nepali traditional dance called Manjushree in Nepal. As I danced "Manjushree", I realized there was some kind of a "language" (in the beginning stage of language development, I would say) unlike dances in the West (which generally is emotion-based movement). Since the traditional dances in the East (India and Nepal) have some kind of "vocabulary" that is a set of mudras, I envisaged it was a possibility to integrate choreography with visual-spatial language like sign language to the fullest.
Eventually, some of my works include some experimental choroegraphic elements in languages (Ameslan/ASL and English) -- adding choreographic element to text in English, such as Lone Poetry (2006-07) and Dandelions. During this period, I also explored the calligraphic element in ASL (which I called it "verbal calligraphy) and related it to Japanese/Chinese calligraphy. I compared calligraphy (which means beautiful writing) and choreography in vocal singing. People see Japanese calligraphy like dance-writing. I see vocal singing as a form of verbal-vocal calligraphy (beautiful writing in the air) and a form of lip dancing. At the moment, there is little or virtually no studies on choreography in sign language. Dance and sign language, like Japanese calligraphy, share visual-spatial modality.
References
Jolanta Lapiak. http://www.lapiak.com.
Mélanie Morrissette. http://www.horschamp.qc.ca/new_offscreen/choreography.html . August 31, 2002.