ACADEMIA Letters

Dance Literacy: Reader Response and Affective Stylistics

Kalpana Iyengar

Literacy is organized communication and literacy acquisition occurs both in and outside of
school setting (Gee, 1998). According to Goody (1975), Literacy is predominantly linguis-
tic, but communication in modern times prompted people to invent and utilize various other
modalities outside of the linguistic modes of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. All
living things use different approaches to communicate with others in their community. While
animals are confined to movement or circumscribed to a set of sounds, human beings can
use letters, ideographs, symbols, sounds, as well as movements to convey messages to oth-
ers. While modern cultures often privilege writing, literacy can occur through a variety of
modalities (e.g., linguistic, kinesics, tonal semiotics). In this article, I explore kinesthetic lit-
eracy (i.e., Bharatanatyam dance) and the participants’ Reader Response (RR) application,
especially “affective stylistics” (Fish, 1970) to the dance experience. The RR framework
established by Rosenblatt (1994) serves as a powerful pedagogical strategy in schools even
today.
The Bharatanatyam dance is especially well chosen for this line inquiry for the following
reasons: (1) It is based on systematized, transmediated, and highly codified movements that
were designed to convey messages (e.g., stories, epics, celebrations) and (2) the origin of
this dance is culturally embedded in the community upon which I report. The population
my daughter and I worked with are stigmatized because of their parents’ leprosy disease.
About 200 young children are housed in an ashram near Haridwar, India, whocannot attend
regular schools due to health restrictions and the misconception that leprosy is contagious.
These children cannot be integrated into the main stream population and are restricted from
attending regular schools. In order for these ‘othered’ children to learn stories from the Hindu
epics, we designed a three-week workshop and taught the children through music and dance.
Dance as Kinesthetic Literacy

Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Kalpana Iyengar, devayanigowri@gmail.com

Citation: Iyengar, K. (2021). Dance Literacy: Reader Response and Affective Stylistics. Academia Letters,
Article 757. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL757.

1
 My daughter, a Girl Scout at the time of her visit, was asked to teach children at the ashram
a story about prince Rama. He is the epic character from Ramayana, the Hindu religious text.
Due to lack of technology, desks, chairs, etc., she decided to teach the children a dance on
Lord Rama. The dance was based on a bhajan (spiritual poem) and it was choreographed by
my daughter’s dance teacher back in the U.S. Sri Rama Chandra Kripalu Bhajamana is in the
language of Sanskrit, which is culturally proxemic and relevant to the participants since they
lived in North India and in the spiritual town of Haridwar. The dance described the beauty,
prowess, and noble qualities of Lord Rama. Both the song and the dance served as literacy
tools to help children learn about the quest character from Ramayana. Thus, music and dance
became devices through which children were able to understand the story depicted and hence
form new knowledge. We first explained the song and enabled children to engage them in a
RR activity.
Reader Response Framework
Reader Response framework (Rosenblatt, 1994; Iser, 2000) provides the basic tenant of the
transactive nature of the text and the reader. On the other hand, affective stylistics propounded
by Fish (1970) and Shi-jun (2010) merits the readers’ interpretation of a text and the text
cannot establish the intended meaning outside of the readers’ emotions. The basic premise
is that readers conceptualize the meaning of the text through reading, recreating the assigned
passage (Cahill, 1996). However, if the story had an emotional connection to the readers, then
their engagement with the text volumized or amplified. “Affective stylistics” can be applied
to reading materials in any format (e.g., kinesthetic, musical, art).
Further, Tyson’s (2006) taxonomy of the RR criticism provides us with an understanding
of the different levels of RR theory. For example, the Social Reader-Response Theory (Brooks
& Brown, 2012; Lewis, 2000) congruent with socio-cultural theory (Vygotsky, 1980), posits
that texts are interpreted in a collaborative environment through a collective understanding of
the materials presented. All of the workshop participants shared an established schema (i.e.,
dance), which enabled them to interpret the text (i.e., the song) and thereby comprehend the
characteristics and glory of Lord Rama as depicted through the dance. The workshop was an
illustrative of systematic communication utilizing tonal semiotics and kinesic modalities for
literacy education.

Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Kalpana Iyengar, devayanigowri@gmail.com

Citation: Iyengar, K. (2021). Dance Literacy: Reader Response and Affective Stylistics. Academia Letters,
Article 757. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL757.

2
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Academia Letters, April 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Kalpana Iyengar, devayanigowri@gmail.com

Citation: Iyengar, K. (2021). Dance Literacy: Reader Response and Affective Stylistics. Academia Letters,
Article 757. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL757.