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Is dance a “body language” or does it constitute what Antonin Artaud called a “physical speech” or “speech before words”? The phrasing of the danced gesture does not enunciate any discourse other than that of sensation, in its intensive deployments and its disengagement into figuralities (perceptual simulations, resemblances, physiognomies). What dance formulates is first and foremost a song of tonus, a refound expression of the “affects of vitality” in which our “tonic dialogue” with the movements of the world and living things consisted in early childhood. It is from the child’s mimetic responses to the movements of the world that we can understand Walter Benjamin’s profound intuition, when he postulated a genetic connection between gesture and speech: the same mimetic gift of “producing and distinguishing resemblance” that is the expressive matrix of language. The practice and performance of dance remain one of the best sites for experiencing this mimetic gift, when gesture is eloquent.