What is the most common statement you often hear about dance? If you are tempted to pick ‘It’s a universal language’, that means you might have come across this quote many times. The quote came up again at the 2024 Springback Assembly of dance writers in Budapest, within a discussion on translation. Many great artists, including American choreographer and activist Alvin Ailey, have been championing dance as an art form for everybody, with the power to overcome social, economic or cultural barriers. But can we really accept dance as universal?

When I first started my journey in dance marketing, I was an ambassador of this idea, believing that ‘universal language’ would mean reaching the widest possible audiences. The result? A utopian attempt to have a packed audience from different backgrounds experiencing dance in the same – hopefully meaningful – way. Recent years of professional experience has taught me that Meredith Hill was right in saying: ‘When you speak to everyone, you speak to no one.’ Supposing that dance will be experienced in the same way by everyone may wash out its cultural meaning, its plurality of languages, and its core understanding. It’s a centric, black-and-white vision that excludes the colour in the peripherals. 

Dance can indeed create a common ground. When words fail, dance connects us through our shared bodily experience. During my two years living in Helsinki, I never felt lost or excluded in my local contemporary dance classes, fully taught in Finnish. I was constantly present in the studio, dipping myself in the higher sense of togetherness that movement allowed me to feel and share with the others around me. Stories like this one are also described in Jennifer Edwards’ essay ‘Culture in Context, as Import and in Exchange’. During Jacob’s Pillow Festival, dancers in residence who didn’t speak the same language, nor use the same movement vocabulary, came together on the dance floor to form a meaningful collective experience. There’s a movement exchange, even when they cannot communicate through words. 

Participation might be the key to emphatically seeing and experiencing dance, even as an audience member. Whether this is in the dance studio, in a black box theatre, or a site-specific event, initiatives such as post-show talks, Q&As, resources, interviews or workshops can also help us raise a universal understanding that dance holds endless languages rooted in rituals, symbols, traditions, political and social visions about the world we lived, live and we will live in. And isn’t that the beauty of dance? 

I often remember the words of choreographer Lia Rodrigues: ‘We need to consider diversity and include different dances, like the white dance or the Indigenous dance. Terminology can reflect our position in the world and that is why we must change it. We need to expand the terminology of contemporary dance to allow new voices and new bodies to come in.’ 

So I ask: are dance universal languages?