productive choreographies

We are seeing, and feeling, an uprising in artists working with, in and on themes of environmental injustices, climate change, anticolonial frameworks, and post-capitalistic mandates. These themes are important and urgent, and make me question my role as an artist. What can you do from this positionality? 

It is here where I began to imagine the potential of performativity, reframing the word, and what productive choreographies would a) look like, b) how they would be consumed and c) how they could affect local or global communities.

Considering the difference between performance and action, positioning myself with performance studies writer Richard Schechner through the lens of Bojana Cvejić and Ana Vujanović, I care to explore the expression of performance as showing-doing rather than just doing. [9] Acknowledging that an “act/action and a performance operate in different degrees of publicity and different registers of discursive order of society,” I believe performance holds the capacity to share knowledge and inform futures. [10]

An artist who is actively achieving this play between performance and action is Carolina Caycedo with their geochoreographies practice. This choreographic concept bridges creative practice with physical practices that already exist (fishing, throwing a net into sea, etc.) between people and land, and accessing them or reframing choreographic thought into what Caycedo calls “mobile acts of resistance.” [11]

I think this reframing of sensory movement can be described as productivity. Productivity here is to generate motions that are significant for you or others. It is not about excessive commodities; it is about fruitful fertilization. It is a way to recognize folks who are already practicing in these ways—whether it is performative in nature or labour processes that are not formally perceived as dance.