Written by: Lake Angela, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
The possibilities for the intersemiotic translation of a poem into movement are potentially endless, especially when we consider the opportunities for conveying multiple meanings at once, a goal I call purposeful ambiguity, and the ways we can extend emotion to viewers by way of the dancers’ motions. In the multimedia work “La Louve,” Laëty Tual* and I collaborate across different idioms—including French verbal language, poetry, French Sign Language (LSF: langue des signes française), music, and different styles of dance. With such linguistic variety, we aim not only to create an evocative translation but also to provide Deaf and hearing audiences alike new ways to form interpretations of the poem based on the sensations viewers physically-emotionally experience while watching our different ways of moving to meaning.
Some classical forms of dance use long-established signs, including gestures with set meanings that seek to make one-to-one correspondences with words or phrases. Classical ballet has its own lexicon of gestures, or ballet mime, for describing the narratives on which the dances are based in addition to ballet’s codified movements. For example, ballets still employ a gesture to denote a meaning as specific as that of a man sleeping or a woman sleeping. Complex and highly expressive gestures belong to traditions such as Bharatanatyam, yet these also establish denotative meanings. The dance employs mudras that may be altered in contemporary usages and interpreted but are still widely recognized hand positions to complement footwork and facial gestures. For example, in the alapadma mudra, the fingers and thumb spread and curl into a blooming flower to signify a lotus, or, in other contexts, to connote more abstract concepts like creation or romance. While some mudras are as straightforward as the pataka, or flag, to signify pause, when altered slightly even this relatively direct mudra can call forth forests, clouds, and other images across contexts.
Whole dictionaries of one-to-one correspondences have been recorded in their respective dance styles. My aspirations with intersemiotic translation include the opposite: I seek movement that encompasses the most variety of meaning available to the word, line, punctuation, syntax, sound of the stanza, and so forth when translating a poem into dance. I choose to focus on feeling first—on creating movement that evokes emotion in performer and viewer alike—because poetry is an emotive language whose meaning is created anew each time a poem is read. Most of the poetry with which I work, including my own, is not narrative. Similarly, the dance I use in this collaboration with Laëty is purposefully ambiguous—as in multiply meaningful—to culminate in a motive and emotive experience for audiences.
Laëty translates into LSF, and as an idiom that conveys concepts through hand movements and gestures reinforced by facial expressions, this language is an apt starting point for Laëty to augment into whole-body expressions of concepts supported by emotion and rhythm. LSF arguably already makes more use of sound than some other sign languages (including American Sign Language, or ASL, which has its origins in LSF but more often describes the shapes of objects denoted). Laëty’s innovative work makes music bilingual with the goal of showing that “music is also visual, or as some Deaf artists have called it, vusical.” (Ma spécialité, ma passion, mon travail... : Le chansigne (chanson en Langue des Signes), avec cette vidéo amateur, je souhaite partager mes envies de création où la musique serait aussi visuelle, comme certains artistes Sourds l'ont appelé elle serait "vusicale".) Because facial expression and movement complement hand shape and established vocabulary, much of what is conveyed to an audience depends upon the translator’s interpretation, as with any intersemiotic endeavor. However, Laëty also experiments with new ways to present sound visually and in motion for Deaf audiences, as can be seen in her extensive work under the title of Laëty/ChanSigne.
In our collaboration, she translates her own poem, “La Louve,” into LSF and layers the video with pulsing movement cues as well as sound bars at the bottom of the screen that present the movement of the music and the sounds of the poem spoken. Laëty has made our multimedia video pulse so that, in addition to the sound bars, we have both rhythm and melody presented visually. In her interpretation, rather than stand in a small space, she extends her gestures into flowing dance movements that weave together a whole-body LSF dance. Laëty calls her method ChanSigne, “a form of artistic expression in sign language to the rhythm of music” (une forme d'expression artistique qui consiste à s'exprimer en langue des signes au rythme de la musique). She also originates Le ChanSigne de création, the creative work first conceived in sign language. As the primary translator, she chose the music to support her poetic work and interprets the music visually, with both the rhythm of the pulsing and sound bars and the gestural flow contributing to the poetic continuity of her embodied poem.
Layered with Laëty’s version is my translation of her “La Louve” into dance. It makes sense that my dance is influenced by the styles I have studied and in which I have performed, so it is possible at times to see vocabulary from capoeira, modern dance, ballet, and so forth, but primarily I attempt to generate dance vocabulary from physical experiences I recall as having generated similar sets of emotional and associative meanings, movement with the power to convey the emotions invoked in the poem. These could just as well resemble a pedestrian movement as a surprising and unusual movement or the distinctive movement style of flamenco, the first kind of dance I studied and, therefore nearly always one of the first ways I conceptualize a choreographic movement thereafter. I seek motions that describe the apt emotions to impact those who view the dance first physically-emotionally before logical thought begins the process of unraveling the dance in the same way we might unfurl a poem—by peeling back the layers to “see” ever deeper in between.
This way of choreographing is a priority based on my development of intersemiotic processes for the German language expressionist poems I have translated into dance and later for translating to communicate schizophrenia spectrum meanings in movement. I seek ways of conceptualizing for common or neurotypical understandings other, neurodiverse ways of knowing that can extend over cultural diversities, the meeting places of physical-emotion meanings. I hope that we continue to establish and refine such moments as Laëty and I collaborate for multiple audiences, to embody and present different ways of knowing rather than uphold our western culture’s predilection for hierarchical, logical meanings. We are presenting, as Jaym* del Val explains in the proposal for the project Bodynet-Khorós, just a few of the many idioms that can help to fulfill our dire “need for a diversification of movements and perceptions that have become atrophied by millennia of alignments with geometric, mechanistic, algorithmic and utilitarian environments.”
The video of “La Louve” in movement makes translations of sound for Deaf audiences and naturally offers ways of seeing sound to a hearing audience, encouraging different ways of sensing what hearing people think of as sound. In the development of our video to this effect, Laëty interpreted the music she chose, but as a translator of the poem directly into dance movement, I did not hear the music when crafting my translation or prior to seeing the final video that Laëty cut together. As I translate a poem directly into dance, I choreograph without music to influence my movement meanings, whereas Laëty is a musician who also translates music into other languages. Even with these different focal points, viewers will note that in the video my movements coincide with Laëty’s in places that occur naturally, strengthening the meanings of the poem we portray.
I often emphasize that I always aim for transformation in my intersemiotic translation work. Transformation is important to my idea of translation because in the same way that a reader or performer moves a poem to meaning with breath, I embody the poetic work by moving it into being. In this case, the content lent itself organically to transformation, as did the sound of the verbal language. The poetic use of sound is important to my translation into dance, as it shapes movement accordingly, even if I am working in outward silence. My dance furthermore is loosely choreographed so as to leave movements uncontrolled and open for interpretation in the moment with the goal of transforming into Laëty’s louve.
It is important to note that Laëty chose the figure of la louve as specifically a female wolf rather than the more common title for wolf, le loup, which is implicitly male in the French. Where written language can be as specific as to denote species and gender in these ways, the possibilities with translation into movement can be both more precise and more ambiguous, as dance vocabularies are vast and emotive, untethered by logic to denotation and connotations only. The limitations that contribute to a visual precision, in turn, are those belonging to the instrument of the translation, as Michele Hanlon has called the dancing body. Even the same instrument varies widely across lifespan and dance pieces. It is also my aim to use this kind of limitation in ways that are subversive—in some dance works by highlighting some of the body’s perceived deficits to show that such attributes are complementary to meaning-making. For example, the Western dance world remains biased against advanced age and weight, yet we need look no further than modern dance to experience the importance of weight, or to flamenco’s example of prizing the expressive capabilities of those with more life experience, and to artists like Kazuo Ohno, who performed some of his most expressive pieces with only his hands as he reached one hundred years of age.
I also intend to use my own physical limitations to impose a structure for purposeful ambiguity to develop richly, as I would use a traditional form in poetry to force the mind to create new ideas for lines rather than pour out easy content or repeat well-used ways of phrasing. When I worked on Laëty’s poem into dance, I recently had given birth, and the body as “writing” instrument was limited but also open to new physical-emotional information from the recent experiences. In this way, even the limitations of changed body contributed to my constant priority when translating—actively transforming. From the poetic work first conceived by Laëty in French and then ChanSigne, I seek not only to pick up the paces of her louve and run, but to become her wolf.
Lake Angela, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Lake Angela is a poet, translator, and dancer-choreographer who creates at the confluence of verbal language and movement. As Director of the international multimedia group Companyia Lake Angela, they offer sessions in guided healing through poetry and movement and provide a platform for schizophrenia spectrum creativity. Their full-length books of poetry, Organblooms (2020) and Words for the Dead (2021), are published by FutureCycle Press. As poetry editor for Punt Volat, they select and publish innovative new poetry in four languages with co-founder Kevin Richard Kaiser. As co-founder of Poetry Midwives Editing Services, they help aspiring writers polish their manuscripts for publication. Lake holds a PhD from The University of Texas at Dallas for their intersemiotic translations of German Expressionist poetry into dance and their MFA in poetry.
