choreography and its place in the world

Continuing the thread of dance as a way of knowing and Alva Noë’s statement regarding relational enactment, before we consider performativity we must consider choreography.

I understand choreography in both the traditional sense of dancing bodies performing together in time and space with or without music (ballet, theatre, etc) and also, and more intentionally, embodied events that transpire between an individual, a pairing or a collective. Choreography is inherently relational.  

Jaana Parviainen in her piece Choreographing Resistances: Spatial–Kinaesthetic suggests “[c]horeography here refers to all activities and events in which movement appears as meaningful interactions and relations between various agents.” [3] Philosopher Erin Manning also writes “[w]hen an event architects a mobility that outdoes it, the relationship between body and spacetime has fundamentally shifted. No longer do we have the human at the center. Instead, we have priming-for-movement, cues, alignments, inflections, vacuoles of expression. We have an architecture that persons and a moving that choreographs.” [4]

Both of these statements engage with my notion of a reciprocal spatial practice living at the centre of all interactions. The ability to observe these layered kinesthetic fields that place or contextualize sites of choreographies, as I understand it, can be read through the body, but are always co-worlded. [5] These sites can exist in places as small as cues and inflections, as stated by Manning. They can also be bold and loud and manipulated by outside factors or figures.

Bojana Cvejić in her text How Does Choreography Think ‘Through’ Society? writes “choreography is constituted as a social practice. Like other performing arts, choreography is shaped by the social structures (discourse and institutions, customs, modes of production and relations of power) in which it operates. More than theatre or performance art, it can provide a physical model to think through (i.e. consider and analyse) various aspects of the social as they arise ‘through’ physical arrangements of bodies in motion within a spatiotemporal event.” [6]

The intra-activity, in the Karen Barad’s sense of the word, exists in all choreographies between land, body, plant, vegetable, object, place, histories, memories, or even speculative futures. [7] The act and experience of choreography is quite nuanced. It offers a platform to see the social, and activate social change with exchanges of care.

Michael Klien in his text, with Steve Valk, WHAT DO YOU CHOREOGRAPH AT THE END OF THE WORLD? names choreography as “a metaphor for dynamic constellations of any kind” and also calls in choreography as an agent for change that is embodied into an “ever-changing environment.” [8] 

What if the word care replaces the word change?