On the bike this morning I came across a graffiti. “Pure hate” sprayed on a wall, obviously in black but with quotation marks, caught me thinking, that’s philosophically kind of complex. Pure hate cannot be attached to an object or phenomenon, cannot be directional or emanate out of a subject, a human or a ghost. It must be prominently abstract or it’s simply not pure, and as we know pure is binary and not something a little bit, or a gradient. Pure hate can be contemplated but not practised, it has no expression and certainly no representation. It is whatever you want it to be, or probably not even that.
Naturally one can flipside hate and the result is the same, pure love cannot be practised and the same goes for true love, it’s just not an option even though it might be what we still have to strive for. Somewhere in “A Lover’s Discourse” Roland Barthes voice that the lover’s responsibility is exactly to never give up on the impossible, and that love is lost the moment it’s turned into something reasonable, negotiable or a little bit of give and take. Almost as if the lover is accountable to love rather than to the loved one.
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I can’t remember the title but I have a feeling there are many films with this type of scene. One character, an inventor, artist, maybe an aspiring chef or architect, is proudly showing her, his or their creation to a friend, partner or similar, who hesitantly asks, but what is it? And the creator, perhaps with a bit too much enthusiasm, declares, whatever you want it to be. Quite disarming, kind of touching to be proud of something that can be whatever you want.
In cinema, a MacGuffin is an established concept. It’s something that sets a series of events in motion but in itself has no value. It can be something but, as in the famous example, Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” a MacGuffin can also be nothing as long as it poses as something. In as much as it creates direction or tensions it can be whatever you want it to be.
Lately, choreography has been cut in the middle. Over the last ten or so years an endless stream of neologisms has appeared, ditching the graphy part and instead combining the choreo side with all kinds of imaginative catchwords, from choreopolitics to choreophantasmatic and choreodynamics, even choreoradical and choreo-erotics. Enticing, but what exactly? Sounds great but isn’t it a bit like when you translate a rock band’s name to another language and discover how often how phoney it comes out? Like U2 in French or The Cardigans in any language, not to mention almost every death-metal act. Why not spell it out and swap the quasi-Greek resonance for what it really is, a kind of remix between dance and chorus, dancing and together, but indeed it makes it all a lot less flashy, cool or scholarly prominent.
Moreover, is there perhaps something that gets lost when the two sides lose touch? Something that, to mention one option, has to do with labour, even craft and rigour? Choreography is a craft, a certain, however multi-layered, set of skills that when activated can generate for example movement or organisation of movement. What is something choreoradical in regard to skillsets, or what does a choreopolitician do in the office?
I can also find the choreo aspect more attractive. After all, it communicates forms of if not freedom, at least freeness, expression, perhaps even joy, and certainly opens up to forms of social and political activism. Examples of what could be named choreoactivism are well known: cheerleading-like dance elements incorporated in political manifestations, why not Pope L’s crawling performances, many interventions by Extinction Rebellion or climate protesters glued to a road. Solid and keep going, but it can also be gently noted that dance, choreo, tendentially ends up becoming a service, therefore being appreciated largely due to its effectivity, not aesthetic “value.” The ending part in choreography is important in regard to that it isn’t anything else than some form of organisation, structuring, codification or writing. It doesn’t propose content which, however, doesn’t mean that whoever engages with choreography can’t engage it with meaning, content, politics, conflict, identity, care and so on. It’s precisely because choreography is generic that it offers itself to so much, it’s “neutral” and therefore without borders. Choreography can generate whatever you want but that doesn’t make it whatever you want.
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In the performance, theatre and dance environments we’ve seen terms show up and gain traction. Some of them last, others fade quickly like fads. Iconoclastic theatre was one, post-mainstream theatre, post-dramatic theatre, post-internet dance, post-dance and ambient theatre other. They were great, but curiously, when looking behind often superficial definitions it seems that the framing term more or less coincides with the originator’s personal taste. Post-dramatic theatre was whatever Hans-Thies Lehmann was into or whatever artists he fancied did. Even better, post-dramatic is whatever you want it to be. Quite convenient. Post-dance is perhaps the best (in the bad sense) since it was even constructed as a MacGuffin. Nothing dressed up as something.
I’m sure there are exceptions but to me, many of the choreo-somethings that have shown up appear to enter the same ballfield as post-dance. They are handy for researchers, critics or artists because they can mean anything and since there are no proper definitions it becomes difficult to produce a critique or even a question.
Recently the choreographic has popped up as a catchy epithet. It’s been used here and there for a longer time but not as something self-contained, even something one can study.
Choreography, although old school, is the art of making dances. In other words, a choreography is an organisation of movement over time, movements that can but must not be human, and movement obviously includes stillness. It’s a noun and the verb is to choreograph or choreographing. The adjective choreographic is a or many qualities that something carries, for example, Greta Gerwig’s movies or Robert Mapplethorpe’s photography, although they were never choreographed. Choreographic isn’t necessarily connected to aesthetics but can also be identified in how a chef operates in the kitchen or how a group of cows move around in their pasture. It’s a matter of appearance, it looks as if choreographed but isn’t. But, what happens when the adjective is made into a noun again, into the choreographic? Not only as the choreographic quality of something but as an autonomous object or something that can be identified in the same way as a kettle, a person or a dance festival? I wonder what you study or research when the object is the choreographic.
The theatrical, or the performative I can go along with, because neither is directly attached to organisation or structure in the way choreography is. What the choreographic appears to capture is the expression of choreography without choreography. But what cannot not be understood to express or carry something that can be identified as choreographic? A zebra crossing is choreographic, a bunch of entangled chairs, the movements of DHL delivery trucks are very choreographic, parades, track and field events, IKEA, any guided tour, you name it. At the end of the day, isn’t the choreographic exactly whatever you want it to be? A total MacGuffin.
But, mind you, only in regard to appearance or representation, because behind the choreographic there’s nothing, it’s a wrapping. In this respect, the choreographic, which could initially be understood as something additive and expanding, in fact, diminishes choreography, returns it to a time prior to the No manifesto (what is unique with Yvonne Rainer’s manifesto is the insistence on media specificity) and is fully dismissive in regard to choreography as expanded practice. Choreography as expanded practice, which btw has nothing to do with expanded choreography (whatever that might be), was, when articulated in the late 00s, exactly an attempt to detach choreography from appearance and representation in favour of understanding it as a generic set of tools that could be utilized both vis-à-vis analyses and production. Not just of dance, but of anything, for example, films, books, situations, webpages, the weather, businesses, education, stock markets, distribution systems or landscapes. This shift of understanding or definition was crucial because it detached choreography from forms of appearance and representation, and freed it from being identified through recognition. It further expanded choreography from being contained in the aesthetic and offered it to become a discipline on its terms, the study and knowledge of forms of movement, flows, dynamics or in short, the organisation of time over space.
