Languages of Movement: Folk Dance in the Light of Semiotics, Bodily Cognition, and Communication

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to analyse folk dance as a language of culture through the prism of semiotic and communicative approaches, as well as to identify the structural and semantic characteristics of dance text. Research methodology. An interdisciplinary approach was used, combining the tools of semiotics, cultural studies, and art history. The method of semiotic analysis provides an opportunity to interpret folk dance as a text with a symbolic structure, while the communicative approach helps to consider it as a means of dialogical interaction within a cultural community. Scientific novelty. An analysis of folk dance was conducted within the framework of semiotic and communicative approaches, emphasising its ability to encode, transmit, and preserve cultural meanings. The study opens new horizons for an interdisciplinary understanding of dance as a cultural code that simultaneously preserves tradition and responds to contemporary challenges. Conclusions. Folk dance in traditional and contemporary contexts appears as a multi-level semiotic and communicative phenomenon in which physicality, ritual, symbolism, and emotionality are combined into a single system of transmission and formation of meanings. Its uniqueness lies in its ability not only to transmit cultural heritage, but also to renew it in response to the challenges of the times, while preserving its structural recognisability. Dance functions as an intermodal art form, where every element — from gesture to rhythm, from costume to space — participates in the creation of a multisensory text. The appeal to bodily cognition (according to B. Johnson) and the semiotic approach allows the author to understand choreography not as a purely aesthetic form, but as an instrument of embodied thought, where the body is not only a tool, but also a thinking agent. With its versatility, folk dance plays a number of important social, communicative, ritual, and cultural functions, serving as a form of collective memory and an effective means of cultural identification.