Decolonising Terminology: Why English Needs a Word for Dance-Music Unity
Decolonising terminology – dance-music unity
English has become the global language, which is undoubtedly a boon for international communication. Yet this dominance often pushes much of the world’s academic work into a single linguistic channel. Such reliance narrows the conceptual, expressive, and epistemological wealth present in every other language and creates the false impression that any idea can be seamlessly transferred through translation. This discussion tackles one concrete instance of a missing term in English: the unity of dance and music. The aim is to examine epistemological arguments—why do we pull dance and music apart, and what reasons exist for bringing them together under a single name? The question then becomes: why are terms from other languages not seen as valuable resources for improving academic vocabulary in English and other European tongues?
The concept that is absent
Fields like dance anthropology, ethnochoreology, and ethnomusicology face a persistent gap: European languages rarely offer a simple, one‑word expression for the complex formed by dance and music, or dancing and musicking. Practitioners frequently stress that dance and music represent two inseparable sides of the same whole, yet disciplinary terminology still has no label for that union. There are two ways to consider this absence. First, the lack of a specific term does not erase the phenomenon itself—we usually find roundabout ways to reference it, even though describing and translating the idea becomes awkward and unsatisfactory. Second, the words we have (or lack) shape how we understand a phenomenon epistemologically.
As a Scandinavian, the Norwegian author misses the word døgn — the period covering a day and a night — when switching to English. Is this merely a translation inconvenience, a case of being unable to express something in English the same way as in one’s mother tongue? Or does it affect how we orient our thinking? Much like the missing term for dance and music, døgn joins two contrasting parts. Practitioners and scholars from many African countries report that they lack words to speak about the movement dimension and the sound dimension of dance‑music separately. What would it mean not to have vocabulary that distinguishes day from night?
“The practical impossibility of conveying in one language exactly what was originally said in another.” — María T. Sánchez, The Problems of Literary Translation
It is worth noting that Rudolf Laban, as early as 1920, declared an ideological goal of liberating dance from serving other expressions, especially music. Choreographers still test dance without music, employing varying artistic rationales.
The choreomusical split
Western dance researchers have also highlighted the unity of dance and music and opposed the division in ways reminiscent of critiques of the Cartesian split. Meanwhile, the dance‑music relationship has become a popular topic, and fresh terms have appeared — choreomusical and choreomusicology . In some senses these labels reinforce the very split they attempt to bridge. The Danish scholar Inger Damsholt maps and discusses these coinages, attributing them to the American musician and educator Paul Hodgins. They let us talk about the relationship of dance and music and treat it as a sub‑discipline straddling choreology and musicology.
Movement and sound are different expressions
It has often been heard in conference discussions and informal exchanges that educators and researchers are criticised for failing to keep dance and music together. Yet a necessary reminder is that dancers produce movement as their primary expression, whereas musicians chiefly produce sound — or, more precisely, musicians produce movement intended to be perceived mainly as sound. Analysing movement patterns demands knowledge, training, and methods that diverge sharply from those used for sound patterns. In spite of the conviction that dance and music cannot and should not be cut apart, practical and methodological necessity forces researchers and teachers to analyse each with separate tools. They can, of course, handle both simultaneously, and integrated methods are possible up to a point. But learning to produce movement and learning to produce sounds are inevitably different processes. Few experts will ever become equally adept at analysing and teaching both mediums. Expecting all specialists to abandon narrow expertise seems both unrealistic and unnecessary. Many practitioners themselves focus on only one expression. That situation contrasts strongly with experts who lack any comprehension of, or interest in, more than one aspect. Approaching dance and music in parallel — and viewing them together as a social phenomenon — makes their unity obvious in most contexts.
A culturally woven bond
Given such practical splits, why insist that dance and music still form a unity? Is there a genetic urge to respond to organised sound with movement? Do we instinctively attach sound to certain patterns of motion as an all‑human reflex? These questions lie well outside the author’s expertise. Yet empirical work repeatedly shows that the link between dance and music is culturally constructed. Nature’s laws do not bind them together. Dancers and musicians, in the author’s experience, are primarily motivated by the sensation of movement and sound merging, deriving deep satisfaction from their interplay. There are hardly any limits, though, to how that interplay can operate or be created.
In today’s fusion‑oriented culture, a dancer and a musician from entirely different genres performing together often makes headlines as a sensation — but it is actually not that challenging. Because the dance‑music bond is cultural, most dancers can adapt their skills and patterns to any kind of music, and most musicians can tailor their playing to any sort of movement. More precisely, dancers can move their bodies using fundamental patterns in whatever way occurs to them, but they are constrained by what they know and can do. Imagine a tango dancer and a ballet dancer, each highly skilled in their own genre but not the other’s, given complete freedom. The claim is that neither could take over the other’s dancing nor produce an identical improvisation. Humans cannot do something skillfully that they have not learned. Even contemporary dancers who believe they can move freely remain trapped inside their own movement competence. The difference is that performers of most traditional genres find more excitement and satisfaction within defined frames, whereas contemporary dancers often avoid defined patterns and assert that no borders exist for their practice. A credo seems to hold that the instant, immediate expression has particular artistic merit, which tends to devalue dance forms that are “premade” and rely on fixed structures. These ideas need to be set against the recognition that dancing is a skill to be learned and rehearsed. There is no way to learn dancing “in general,” any more than one can learn to “speak in general”; one must choose between French or Turkish, or between Kathak, tango, or a contemporary technique. The arts possess enormous treasures created by renowned choreographers and composers, as well as traditional music and dance that have evolved, been selected, and enjoyed stable existence for centuries, setting millions of bodies in motion. Comparing the immediate, spontaneous expression with dancing or musicking developed through lengthy and refined processes is a bold but exciting pursuit.
Returning to the dance‑music unit: the link between its two components can also result from long‑term selection and adaptation. The resulting choreomusical pattern becomes both stable and flexible. Every time dancers and musicians realise a particular dance, they recreate the choreomusical relationship on which the unit is founded. The permitted range of adjustments is usually so narrow that it demands intense attention and effort for perfection and total harmony. One senses that this dance could not be performed to any other music.
Filling gaps where concepts are missing
Languages have always borrowed words from one another, usually from high‑status languages. In the past, French and English borrowed from prestigious Latin; today English holds high status and exports its own words. Often these borrowings are rather unnecessary — an excellent native term already exists, but speakers still adopt foreign words such as bag or tape in Norwegian. Borrowing from low‑status languages into high‑status ones generally occurs when a phenomenon from a less dominant culture gains global attention; the original name may then find its way into many languages, as with the Norwegian term slalom. Such adoption usually happens almost by chance.
The teaching principle of ngoma
An intriguing case comes from the Norwegian musicologist Jon‑Roar Bjørkvold, who introduced the Swahili word ngoma into Norwegian and English. A reviewer describes his idea:
In his book The Muse Within, which explores universal musical ideas from birth to old age, the Norwegian Jon‑Roar Bjørkvold emphasises the Kiswahili word ngoma. He portrays it as the musical concept that best matches how all children naturally learn music. Whether right or not, the term at least applies to Swahili culture. The word means “drum,” but describes a practice always bringing several expressions together at once — drumming, singing, and dancing. It also reflects the social dimension of making music as a happening.
Bjørkvold’s ideas were warmly received by many educators, and his radical vision of children’s music education encompassed dance. He was not the first to borrow ngoma into a European language — earlier accounts used it for African music and dance. He proposed it as an educational concept that integrates music and dance more universally. Researchers in the field, as far as the author knows, have not adopted ngoma as a general term for the dance‑music complex. Linguistic obstacles certainly exist, and ngoma might not be the most fitting choice, but the principle behind using it is intriguing.
The conceptual benefit of borrowed terms
The sciences have a long tradition of Latin taxonomies; dance studies frequently rely on French taxonomy. This discussion proposes that research benefit by borrowing epistemological constructions available in words from other languages. Doing so usually requires adapting and redefining terms so that concepts limited in time and space can function on a general plane. Furthermore, when describing phenomena that have not been conceived or constructed in the language researchers use, it is vital to employ the terms of the practitioners themselves. Understanding the etymological roots of a term and glimpsing the epistemological universe in which it operates should be a serious concern. Dance research, so argues the author, would be better served by having a word that binds the complex of dance and music together, and that word should be taken from a language where it already functions as epistemological reality.