Page 29 - Tvorjenje pomena in večrazsežna – večkodna pismenost

Arianna Maiorani An Investigation into the New Role of Dance Performance
Loughborough University,
United Kingdom
a.maiorani@lboro.ac.uk
Daniel Lees Fryer
Østfold University College, Norway and social movements has acquired more and more importance (Carter, 2004), to
© 2026 Arianna Maiorani
and Daniel Lees Fryer
Meaning-Making, Multiliteracies
and Multimodality
Abstracts of the International Maiorani,A.,&Wegener,R.(2023).Challenginginstantiationinmodellingmovement-
Symposium
Koper, 19–20 March 2026
in Public Protests: A Kinesemiotic Case Study of Frye’s
ABlack Man’sHeart
From the kickline at Stonewall to the dabke in Palestine, dance in street protests
the point that it can be considered as a ‘mode of spatial disobedience’ (Blanco,
2013, in Daniel, 2023). We propose the case study of Michael Frye’s dance perfor-
mance (from 00.00 to camera change at 1.23), ABlack Man’s Heart, at a widely
broadcast Black Lives Matter protest in New York City in June 2020 (Talia Mota,
2020). Although this might look like an improvisation, the ‘danced march’ shows
a recognisable structure. While evoking the words of Cynthia Erivo’s song Stand
up from Harriet, the biopic of abolitionist and civil rights activist Harriet Tubman,
the performer develops meaningful individual choreographic sequences where
he interacts with the participants around him, thus drawing traditional marching
protesters into the context of his performance. In this way, the performance be-
comes an integral part of the message foregrounded by the march. Drawing on
the Functional Grammar of Dance (Maiorani, 2021) and on its application in stud-
ies beyond thecontext ofdancelikevideogames and politicalspeeches (Maiorani
& Bucy, 2024) our paper proposes a kinesemiotic approach to the study of this
type of movement-based protest. This involves an adaptation of the notions of
Move and Minimal Ballet Sequence (Maiorani et al., 2023), as well as that of Move-
ment Turn Construction Unit (Maiorani & Bucy, 2024), and a focus on the merg-
ing of physical and contextual space that underpin the theoretical basis of the
FGD, and the difference between instantiation and realisation (Maiorani & We-
gener, 2023). Our aim is to develop a methodology to analyse this new type of
performance and its function within the street protest context. This presentation
investigates how dance performance functions as a meaning-making resource in
public protest, through a kinesemiotic case study of Frye’s ABlack Man’s Heart.
Blanco, J. R. (2013). Reclaim the streets! From local to global party protest. Revista
de Estudios Globales y Arte Contemporáneo, 1(1), 171–180.
Carter, D. (2004). Stonewall: The riots that sparked the gay revolution. St. Martin’s
Griffin.
Daniel,O.(2023).Fromstreetpartiestohardbass:DanceandprotestinCzechpost-
socialist urban space. IASPM Journal, 13(2), 59–73.
Maiorani, A. (2021). Kinesemiotics: Modelling how choreographed movement means
in space. Routledge.
Maiorani, A., Bateman, J. A., Liu, C., Markhabayeva, D., Lock, R., & Zecca, M. (2023).
Towards semiotically driven empirical studies of ballet as a communicative
form. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9, 429.
Maiorani, A., & Bucy, E. P. (2024, 10–12 July). Talking and stalking: Movement-based
discursive strategies in political debate [Conference presentation]. 33rd Euro-
pean Systemic Functional Linguistics Conference, Timisoara, Romania.
based multimodal communication. V E. Asp & M. Aldridge (Eds.), Empirical
evidences and theoretical assumptions in functional linguistics (pp. 151–169).
Routledge.
Talia Mota. (2020, 4. junij). Stand Up [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com
/watch?v=uvZxfQDNgQs
https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-565-8.26 29