Multimodal communication through dance-music synchronization: narrative embodiment in classical ballet

Narrative dance uses a repertoire of symbolic dance movements and mimetic and abstract expressive gestures accompanied by various musical elements for meaning generation. This study seeks to gain new insight into entrainment or sensorimotor synchronization between dance movements and musical rhythm for meaning generation in classical ballet solo dance through interviews with choreographers, ballet artistic directors, and senior teachers. The results reveal that entrainment can be seen as involving kinesemiotics (movement-based semiotic systems), metaphorical corporeal articulation (symbolic bodily expression), and expressive gestures for meaning generation and narrative embodiment. It also may arise from emotional induction and kinesthetic empathy (a process in which audiences experience dance through their own sense of movement), resulting from watching and listening to the synchronicity of dance movements and musical beats, where the audio-visual synchrony creates a multimodal rhythm. Each form and level of entrainment, in terms of its duration, sequence, the body parts involved, and the intensity of the beat synchronization, can have semiotic, metaphoric, and/or emotional impact, which may evoke kinesthetic empathy and lead to the emergence of specific meanings.