The classical ballet from a linguistic perspective

In my presentation I will talk about a new joint research project funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and Arts & Humanities Research Council  (AHRC) in cooperation with the English National Ballet (ENB). The project brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers with the aim of evaluating whether a description of dance discourse informed by Multimodal Discourse Analysis (MDA) and visualised through enriched videos can capture the way dance communicates through a flow of choreographed sequences in space, and whether this description can support the interpretative process of nonexpert audiences. The theoretical framework of the research project is based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and on the Functional Grammar of Dance Movement created by Project Investigator Maiorani. The projects makes use of motion capture data for visualisation of ballet dance sequences, and empirical methods involve Event Segmentation Method from cognitive psychology. In my presentation, I will talk about the application of the theories of SFL and MDA to the investigation of classical ballet. I will also present how we can employ computer graphics based on motion capture to study classical ballet from linguistic perspective as well as project's long-term goals.