77 choreographic proposals: Documentation of the evolving mobilization of the term “choreography”
is a journal article by Jeaning Durning and Elizabeth Waterhouse
If you want to learn what “choreography” might be, there were 77 people in a workshop that shared their opinions on this question and on some more:
- What is choreography?
- What if choreography is…?
- What more can choreography be?
- What else can choreography look like?
- When we speak of choreography, what are we speaking of? Are we speaking of the process, the outcome of the process, the score that is performed, the translation of a score by the performer or the performative event itself?
Before moving on to the article, I searched what the dictionaries say about choreography:
- Dance arrangement
- Sequence of dance movements
- Dance notation
Reading these ideas, there were some I would agree with, some that were really odd to my eye and mind and then there were some more provoking. Let me give you some examples:
Choreography can be:
- “A manipulation” or “a game of spectator’s imagination & experiences”
- “A movable picture”
- “A story”
- “Another way of communication” or “a translation of information”
- “Not what you see but what you feel”
- “A path between dreamland and reality”
But could choreography really be:
- “A pragmatic office work”, that is just a job?
- “A fixed improvisation or an invention of rules” ?
- “impossible to realize”?
- “about recording your habits”?
- “a body which is moving because of energies around”?
- “when we don’t know what to do on the stage with our body”?
And, (wow), what if choreography was:
- “not starting where it is finally ending”?
- “a collective framing that ushers action into the actual”?
- “a choice of different life status”, as in the way we are thinking now?
- “desperate”?
- “a distribution”?
- “your own way to find yourself and understand what is really important in our dance life”?, which would mean that choreography helps us to start another way of self-recognition
But, the truth is, that each one of the 77 members of the workshop shared their truth, their own experiences on what choreography is, so I am not judging them; I am only being inspired to make my own term of what choreography is.
One semester of studying and debating about it, this is the term I have reached at until now.
And who knows? Maybe I will inspire another student to create another term for choreography.
Choreography is both a dance creating process and an output of a dance creating process. To be more thorough, choreography as a process combines human body movements or the absence of them based on a rhythm dictated by music[1] or not and is willing to express a message or an emotion. Sometimes costumes, locations, props and lighting help to transmit the message.
Choreography as an output includes all these elements with the difference that it can be alternatively interpreted by the choreographer, the dancers and the audience, as they all carry different experience towards the output. The choreographer has imagined and taught the dance, the dancers have been trained to perform it and the audience are watching, receiving and interpreting every stimulus. Also, this effect of this output is over when the feeling intended to be passed to the audience has changed or transformed.
To that extent, dance is the language, through technique and basic movements, that doesn’t speak; just shows, without using voiced words, but only human movements.
This is a definition of “choreography” that I’ve always been using in my work, in my way of choreography thinking and in my appreciation of dance.
Click here to read more about my thoughts on definitions
[1] As Eiko said: “People expect sound” ( from the book “DANCE: Documents of contemporary art”)