Dance Discourse Communities

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Recommended: Dance as a medium of social communication

The dancing community I’ve been apart of since the age of three is one that has consisted of blood, sweat and tears... literally. My discourse community, meaning a group of members who use communication to achieve goals and purposes, is one I have worked hard to be apart of. My Dance studio is its own discourse community. With the movement of a person’s body on and off stage, they are able to express emotions as well as tell a story at the same time. John Swales believes their are six characteristics which makes for a discourse community. These include having the members of a community sharing their own goals, intercommunication, feedback, genre, lexis, and a level of members with a suitable degree (Swales 220-222). When one thinks of dancers, …show more content…

Spending six days a week together, it’s not hard to get in-touch with other members of my team. In the dance discourse community I belong to, we use our scheduled dance rehearsals and practices to communicate with each other. Text messaging seems to be the only way we can reach each other now-a-days (when we aren’t at practice of course). We also have our own private blog within our dance class, where we are able to post videos of what we practiced that day- incase a rare chance someone was not able to …show more content…

I believe the same goes for dance, which ties into John Swales fourth characteristic of how a discourse community possesses one or more genres or text (Swales 221). A certain genre we use to help dancers and the choreographer operate efficiently is our placement book. Our placement book is created for the students and choreographer. When assigned a specific placement for a certain part of the routine, we mark it down in our book so we are able to look back on it incase one forgets, or if someone was absent. We also have a book created by the choreographer called the “stepbook”. This book gives a brief walk through of the steps and is later copied for each of the members in my discourse community. We look back at these steps once we leave practice and memorize each

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