Choreographing Politics

I am interested in exploring how dance and choreographic practices might be situated explicitly within other fields like political theory. Not as a subject but as a methodology.

Governance and citizenship are not merely matters of law or language or data, despite the tendencies to prioritise these in our current culture. Below and within the conventional language and discourse of politics lies non-rational, physical, emotional,embodied, choreographic, rhythmic currents that constitute human relations. These can be glimpsed through language but there is also a practical knowledge that is held in the body itself and in relation to one’s particular circumstances. A knowledge from the inside.

How and where we think and talk about politics is never neutral. Reading a book, giving a speech to a class or a crowd, a discussion over dinner. Each of these has its own arrangements of people and things in space and times; and its own explicit and hidden rules of interaction. (What in choreography we would call scenography and scores). And so how we think and talk about politics produces a politics of its own.

Hamish MacPherson

MOVEMENT 2