Choreographies and Choreographers

Abstract

The Oxford English Dictionary offers two definitions for the word ‘choreography’: the first, a beguilingly simple assertion, informs us that choreography is ‘the art of dancing’; and the second, marked as an obsolete usage, refers to choreography as ‘the art of writing dances on paper.’ The first definition identifies all aspects of dance as choreographic, whether the process of teaching someone how to dance, the act of learning to dance, the event of performing a dance, or the labor of creating a dance. The second definition, used perhaps for the last time by Rudolf Laban in his Choreutics (1966), specifies choreographers as those who endeavor to notate through the use of abstract symbols the spatial and rhythmic properties of movement. Neither definition, it seems to me, conveys its current usage as the act of arranging patterns of movement. Within the last year, for example, the Los Angeles Times has utilized the term to describe troop movements in Iraq, the management of discussion at board meetings, the co-ordination of traffic lights for commuter flow, the motions of dog whisperer Cesar Millan, and the art of making a dance. This variety of usages suggests that choreography has come to refer to a plan or orchestration of bodies in motion. And in this refined definition, the plan is distinguished from its implementation and from the skills necessary for its execution.