Through the body we can communicate and express ourselves.
As well we receive information about the inner attitude and posture of the people that we relate to.
We speak and express in a verbal abstract manner with words, and we communicate with the body itself what includes posture, gesture, mime and movement.
Already from early childhood on we develop the ability to perceive information and to communicate by body movement. It seems that we learn to differentiate and to evaluate certain aspects of the human body in motion and stillness, that helped us since earlier days and of course today as well, to decide how and if one should confront a certain situation or avoids it or escapes. Means in a way, surviving. Aspects as Body Shape, Movement Direction, Body Tension, the Kind of Urgency, the Movement Flow, Breathing Patterns and so on create a specific Information which is necessary for decision taking.
We call this non- verbal communication. Most of human being are unaware about this form of communication. We have certain intuitions, but we don’t know where they come from.
In our society we have learned to express our needs, idees, and the transmission of information in a verbal way, by words. Words describe reality, Words are a mental-verbal construction. The body on the other hand expresses over movements reality.
In Non-verbal communication, the mental process, the abstract thought is translated in movement. No movement is arbitrary but the result of conscious or unconscious thinking.
One can differentiate between pure functional body action and emotional expressive body movement.
One interprets a movement as functional, when no emotional aspect is involved in the action and the reason of the movement results out of a practical purpose. An emotional body action appears to be a movement that is initiated or produced by feelings.
Dance transmits its contents, (atmospheres, ideas, situations, relations) by body movements, non-verbale communication.
The onlooker unconsciously tries to read, to interpret the body movement of the dancer, its relationship with others, the relation with himself, music, space, time and so on to find certain information, something that make sense to him.