Performance is said to be, nowadays, any action that is watched by an audience.[1]
Choreography is said to be, nowadays, any order of things.[2]
Doesn’t it look very general?
Doesn’t it look very easy?
What I am thinking is that we live in a small chaos that we made when we wanted to start our revolution to the tradition of the classical performing arts.
We thought: “Why can’t choreography be this and this and this?”
and then
“Why can’t performance be this and this and this?”
And we tried to make something new and something old-new and we are now choreographers/ performers/ visual artists/ critics/ sculptors.
We are everything that an artist can be. And we live in 2018! Well done us!
There is really no problem there.
But I have a question.
What happened to the idols? What happened to the people that made history? Where are they?
Where is the next Michael Jackson? The next Balanchine? The next Martha Graham?
We are here now, on this planet, doing everything, mixing our skills with our identity and we become the same as everyone in this small chaos we created. We rarely create something significant. Something identifiable. Something that has only our name on. We rarely do.
And the lucky ones who managed to create their signature on their choreographic pieces, nowadays, are now being part of this chaos.
But maybe this chaos is a phase that choreography and performance are going through.
Maybe we have to get out of the action, observe it and then define it again.
Maybe we would only then need to give a characteristic to them:
Dance-based choreography, theatrical choreography, cooking-based choreography, traffic choreography…
High-art performance, non-art performance…
So, maybe then, I don’t need to create a definition I should use for choreography.
Maybe I should just give a definition on dance and introduce this dance-based definition to my small manifesto of do’s and don’ts in dance choreography.
Or maybe we should not have definitions, but only boards of restricted areas, or circles that connect to each other. But then we won’t be in the small chaos we created anymore.
[1] Elin Diamond, ed, Performance and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge 1996), 5
[2] Merriam-Webster
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