This blog post is a quick dive into a fascinating trend I observed recently, and I felt compelled to share my initial thoughts. TikTok, the reigning social media platform for short-form video content (may Vine rest in peace!), is a hotbed for dance trends. You’ve likely seen the viral dance challenges and routines that sweep across the internet.
However, what truly caught my attention is a specific type of video: dance tutorials that ingeniously incorporate emoji-based dance notation. Take a look at this example:
Back in my graduate school days, immersed in the world of signed languages, I spent considerable time exploring writing systems for signed languages and dance notations. To put it simply, capturing the complexities of human body movement in space and time through written systems or specialized notations is incredibly challenging. Numerous dance notation systems exist, but their limited adoption speaks volumes – they are often intricate, difficult to master, and inherently miss subtle nuances. Furthermore, dance is predominantly learned through visual observation and imitation. Perhaps the most widely recognized form of dance notation is used in ballroom dancing, where footwork patterns are mapped onto the floor using footprint symbols:
The effectiveness of this footwork notation lies in its iconicity. A shoe print visually represents where your foot should be placed. It also conveys essential information, as upper body posture can often be inferred from foot placement in many ballroom styles.
This iconicity principle, I believe, partially explains the success of emoji dance notations. Their effectiveness might also stem from the inherent constraints of the TikTok dance genre. Typically, TikTok dances feature dancers facing forward, with limited spatial movement and minimal footwork. The video format itself is also conducive to this notation – short, easily repeatable videos allow viewers to grasp the full movement while using the emoji notation as a quick guide.
And this emoji notation style isn’t an isolated phenomenon. This compilation showcases various tutorials from different creators, all employing similar emoji-based notation systems.
The ways emojis are used in these notations share similarities with systems like Stokoe notation for sign languages, particularly in indicating handshapes and movements (though not location). Here are some notable ways emojis are employed:
- Articulator: Emojis representing body parts (hands with specific handshapes, peach emoji for hips).
- Manner of Articulation/Movement: Emojis conveying the style of movement (“explosive” emoji), repetition (number emojis), and direction (arrow emojis).
- Iconic Movement Representation (Object-Based): Emojis representing objects to symbolize movements (helicopter emoji for helicopter blade-like hand motions, mermaid emoji for body waves).
- Iconic Shape Representation (Tracing): Emojis depicting shapes to be traced with hands (house emoji for tracing a house shape, heart emoji for tracing a heart).
- (Non-Emoji) Written Shorthand: Text abbreviations for pre-established dance moves (e.g., “WOAH” for the popular “woah” dance).
In conclusion, this emoji dance notation is a brilliant, novel approach to dance instruction, perfectly tailored to a specific online community. It also bolsters the argument that “emojis are gestures.” While not a formal linguistic system, their diverse and user-dependent applications, lacking rigid systematicity, point towards a gestural nature.
However, the grouping of emojis into sequences representing related motions hints at a form of “shallow parsing,” suggesting a nascent, informal structure. Further analysis is needed to solidify this observation. This blend of informality and structure within Dance Emoji notation is what makes it a truly intriguing development in digital communication and dance culture.
