A relationship with words

One of the things I love about new things whether they’re people, products or discoveries is that they highlight our cultural relationship with language.

Latin and Greek are of course the standard fall-to options; it’s amazing fun to annoy etymologists by mixing them up in words such as ‘automobile’, ‘dysfunction’ and did you know ‘octopodes’ is the correct plural of ‘octopus’?

We have a very intimate relationship with words – they’re collective agreements of meaning and I’m sure we’ve all felt failure about the ineffable qualities of emotions such as ‘love’ and the feelings of ‘longing’ – which supports a whole music industry.

You can’t pin a language down; we hear tabloid headlines that the word ‘database’ replaces ‘foxglove’ in a children’s dictionary, ‘twerk’ enters common parlance or an artist coins a new phrase like Dr Suess’s ‘nerd’.

Ralph Fiennes claimed that Twitter is ruining the English language and he’s not alone in thinking this. What do you think? I lean to the side that whatever aids accurate expression of our personal interpretation of life is valid. I saw ‘FML’ in the Evening Standard the other day – and I thought it was quite eloquent. Twitter is probably the most recent mass-modifier of our mumblings (as TV or radio were to their times) and IJAD’s really interested in the relationship it has with our work. As you know, we’re interpreting what you tweet or write to us on 30th immediately within the show, as well as your sharings inspiring the development work itself – as you can see here (hyperlink to vine).

The movement IJAD uses aims to have meaning without words. To reproduce the complex nature of a feeling within a context so that language is not required to speak to your soul – or any pre-existing understanding of dance vocab – that’s why we absorb many cultural experiences and touch many nations around the world (we had 11 countries in one night in March 2013) and join them together.

We’re getting a lot of poems which we’re finding electrifying to work with in the studio. I tend to think of a writer’s relationship with words similar to a photographer – the subject is there – but the wordsmith or photographer selects only certain things to reveal which makes reality more and less than what it is.

IJAD starts with universal themes – and after asking you what you think – ends with a highly culturally specific piece of work. We’re asking you to lend the way you see the world to us and watch as we weave it into a powerful wordlessness.

Follow #InfiniteReach – we’re asking what inspires you about space at the moment.

And if language is your thing, here’s a quote from Stephen Fry:
“Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it’s the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it’s a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot.”

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