Choreographic Practices - Current Issue

Text-based choreographic experiments are omnipresent on contemporary western dance stages. Even though experimentation with different forms of textuality clearly transcends the contemporary moment, the current artistic–choreographic research on language seems to be more explicitly oriented towards treating language itself as a medium for choreography, by emphasizing its rhythm, the physical effort it requires to produce language or by using it to describe movement. In response to the different ways in which performing artists approach language from a choreographic point of view, it has become more and more pressing to start looking at these texts from the choreographic context in which they appear as well. My article proposes a possible framework to do so, by introducing the term ‘kinetic textuality’ and by demonstrating what the choreographic mechanisms behind it possibly signify. Through a close reading of how kinetic textuality functions in the performance Indispensible Blue (Offline), I will in the first place demonstrate that a choreographic perspective on language allows to recognize the dance that is taking place in a piece that seemingly does not have anything to do with dance. Meanwhile, as I will argue, this choreographic perspective on language also allows us to better understand the theoretical gesture underpinning a performance, whose complexity we risk failing to grasp if we only focus on the content of the words.

This article explores choreography and translation as overlapping practices, examining how choreographic processes transform source material into dance. Drawing on theories from translation studies – including feminist and prismatic approaches – it reimagines translation beyond its traditional linguistic boundaries to include choreographic creation as an intermedial, choreo-translation form. Choreo-translation practices are positioned as dynamic sites for ethical and political acts of translation, highlighting resonances between choreographic and translational ethics. Building on this foundation, the article shifts focus to examine the application of translation theories within the dance studio. Through my own choreographic practice, work as a dance dramaturg, and teaching with BA and MA Dance and Theatre students, I outline a series of studio-based exercises designed to explore how translation functions as a creative, constraint-driven process. These practices foreground the performer’s creative agency and engage with concepts such as ethical engagement, multiplicity and embodied meaning-making. By combining theoretical inquiry with studio experimentation, the article proposes a framework for understanding choreography not merely as a representational act but as a dialogic, translational encounter with source materials. It calls for renewed interdisciplinary dialogue and positions choreography as a site for innovating translational thought and practice.

‘Dancing Dante’s La Vita Nuova’ is a reflection on the choreographic process as translation, specifically, prismatic translation, as conceptualized by translation theorist Matthew Reynolds. Dancing three passages from Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova, performing the role of Beatrice, Dante’s female muse, I explore how dance praxis might embolden us to imagine literary texts anew and envision worlds beyond the pen of the author. Following Walter Benjamin’s assertion in ‘The task of the translator’ (1923) that translation breathes a new life into the source text, I investigate through dance-as-translation the potential to craft a new life for Beatrice transcending beyond Dante’s written word. The title of this article, of course, riffs on Benjamin’s foundational essay, framing choreography as a new application of translation.

This article presents Behind Closed Doors, a choreographic research project exploring the philosophical notion of ‘affect’, which resulted in a site-specific dance theatre piece, performed in the John Lewis department store in Liverpool. Drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze and Massumi’s writings on affect, the research sought to examine the shift from physical execution to an embodied and affective experience, in which emotion, intention and perception are inseparable. By disrupting conventional spectatorship and positioning the audience as voyeurs, the work reframed the performer–spectator relationship, shifting focus from visual aesthetics to affective engagement. The study demonstrates how choreographic strategies rooted in everydayness, sensation and improvisation can intensify audience connection, foregrounding dance as a site of affective encounter rather than representation.

When a chronically sick body is not forced to get better, it interrupts notions of productivity, invites slowness and makes space for other ways of being. Closely examining the performance of Sick Witch by chronically ill, body-based artist Johanna Hedva, I argue that their performance undoes assumptions of sickness as a stagnant, passive, waiting state in which the goal is always to ‘get well’. Provoked by Hedva’s work, I ask: what place do sick individuals have within a neo-liberal ontology predicated upon being well? I explore and critique how health and sickness are used to define human value drawing on theorizations of neo-liberalism as an ontology from scholars spanning the fields of dance, performance and disability studies including Petra Kuppers, Maria Firmino-Castillo, Donna Haraway, Stacy Alaimo and others. Using performance analysis I examine how Hedva performs embodiments of sickness – most notably the embodied performance of retching – to disrupt assumptions about getting well. Ultimately Hedva’s performance of Sick Witch reveals an unsettling truth, that not only does a neo-liberal ontology violate chronically ill and/or disabled bodies but shapes our very understanding and enactment of reality; neo-liberalism pushes us to prioritize productivity over our wellbeing.

Inspired by historic protests in India’s capital city, New Delhi, queer and Sikh choreographer Mandeep Raikhy devised The Secular Project in 2020. The Secular Project is a performance work and an archive that exists as a series of short reels, posts and story highlights on Instagram. This article analyses The Secular Project as a dissident social practice and the dancing body as a mode of dissent against majoritarian nationalism. I critically reflect on the notion of secularism in the Indian context and where it stands in reference to the rising religious fundamentalist politics in India. I ask: How is secularism embodied and enacted by its citizens, both in private and public spaces, in contemporary India? How does the dancing body intervene or help us understand the values of a democracy shifting into an authoritarian regime? I employ ethnographic research methods – participant observation, qualitative interviewing and field notes – with choreographic analysis of the work on social media to address the politics of secularism and corporeal dissent in this work. I argue that Raikhy’s choreographic work not only brings activism and dance together but also exemplifies the connection between individual dissent and desired collectivity for social change.