Choreographic Dwellings: Practicing Place ed. by Gretchen Schiller and Sarah Rubidge (review)

Ideally, books should enhance knowledge, challenge perspectives, and engage the reader. In many respects, Choreographic Dwellings: Practicing Place, edited by choreographer/scholars Gretchen Schiller and Sarah Rubidge, succeeds in challenging and engaging the reader with a heterogeneous collection of thought-provoking essays by authors from a variety of disciplines and regions. More generally, the volume raises questions about some of the crucial theoretical shifts that are occurring in dance studies. There is a consistent and creative effort to modify and expand the current performance studies’ lexica, even if at times the push for innovation remains at a linguistic more than a conceptual level. The choice of dwellings¹ in the title as the operative subject, in its double meaning of inhabiting and reflecting upon, immediately emphasizes the focus of the volume, clarified by the subtitle: Practicing Place. Choreographic assumes the role of the attributive adjective.

The editors use the first two chapters to articulate their, at times serpentine, “choreographic thinking” (2), creating a theoretical landscape that allows the reader to understand the experimental works in the anthology, better described as “movement environments or ecosystems, installations or dispositifs” (1). The aim of the editors is to challenge more conventional notions of choreography.

A number of contemporary choreographers engaged in analyzing and theorizing their own work seem to be stepping away from the concept of choreography, almost afraid to be associated with it, and certainly afraid to indicate that they are in an exclusive relationship with it. If at the emergence of dance studies, practitioners and writers turned choreography into the gerundive noun “choreographing” to convey more literally the powerful agency that dance as an art form has to create, read, understand, change the world, and theorize about dance making, by corporeally, consciously and historically inhabiting it,² what does the turn of choreography into an adjective—choreographic—really mean? Is it becoming a linguistic habituation, an omnipresent neologism that locates choreography virtually everywhere—and therefore no longer anywhere?

In many theoretical projects and practices where the “choreographic” is proposed as an alternative to conventional notions of choreography, I often feel a need to understand better what the conventional notions of choreography are that many seem to want to distance themselves from. Those “conventional notions” in Choreographic Dwellings are often nebulous or oversimplified when applied to the dance sphere, where choreography seems to be associated with techniques, styles, or solely concerned with “the transformation, manipulation and elaboration of the movement possibilities afforded by the human body” (2).

In explaining the criteria by which they selected the essays, Schiller and Rubidge clarify that choreographic events in their anthology are not limited to the dance domain. Therefore the concept of choreography involves a migration of dance from strictly theatrical settings to “its manifestation as an immersion in the architecture of the everyday” (2).

We have been familiar with the migration of performances from conventional theater venues to alternative city spaces in New York since the 1960s, when experimental works occurred on the streets, in parking lots, and on the roofs, in addition to art galleries and museums. In more recent decades, the number of site-specific performances has exponentially increased, so the theoretical reading of events has become more elaborated as well. If Henri Lefebvre (1991) freed the idea of space from a pure geometric denotation by populating it with social and political signifiers and actions even in its most abstract representations, in the 1990s specifically in relationship to dance, space became the elected place to elaborate and negotiate issues regarding identity, gender, and race.

The choreographic, in the editors’ terms, is a relational process that connects performers, participants, and space, “materializing new inhabited corporealities” (3). The choreographic’s challenge to more traditional notions of choreography arises not only from the location and the way in which a choreographic work is presented, but also from how place is often redesigned and reconceived by experiential artworks, which in...