Commitment in social choreography: Excavating the Martha Graham Dance Company

Where other, more autonomous art forms would have to share their political inventions in a show-and-tell that leads to the trap of didacticism, social choreography and other forms of social practice can leave room for invention without insisting on it. This approach, however, can give rise to a trap of its own: in the name of participation, artists fashion such an open, unregulated space for audience-participants that those who enter it fall back into roles they know. In this article, I look at a recent collaborative work of social choreography created by Austrian choreographer Michael Kliën with the Martha Graham Dance Company to argue that if social practice is really to intervene in the structure of social space, it must find the art in the way it responds to the pressure of the ordinary.